Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

New New York Times Middle East Correspondent Judy Rudoren wrote yesterday that:

The rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement late Sunday in Cairo that paves the way for elections and a new unity government for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, officials said.

If that sounds a little fimiliar, that's because it is...

Before the deal that ended it last week, the recent Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike in Israeli prisons was being presented as some kind of grand, Gandhi-esque "resistance" movement, pitting peaceful Palestinian "political prisoners" against cruel Israelis. This is certainly the impression that Randa Abdel-Fattah attempted to give in her recent piece on the subject.

As with many claims in the sadly still-unresolved Arab-Israel conflict, this general narrative is little more than a propaganda exercise, aimed at winning undeserved sympathy for people who are far from innocent.

This Update is focussed on Palestinian politics - and especially the significance of the recent, secretive elections within Hamas which chose that organisation's leadership bodies.

First up is Ehud Yaari, leading Israeli journalist renowned for his sources in both Palestinian and other Arab governments, offering unique insights into both how the Hamas elections were carried out, the results, and what they likely mean. The key trends Yaari notes are an increasing predominance of the military wing over politics - as has occurred in Iran - and a growing dominance of the internal leadership in Gaza over Hamas leaders in exile, including especially the increasingly side-lined theoretical top leader Khaled Mashal.

Even as some Australian Palestinians and their supporters spent Tuesday evening disrupting commuters in Sydney in the course of their Nakba Day protests against Israel, SBS World News ran a segment on the recent resettlement of several dozen Iraqi Palestinian refugees in Australia.

(While the video will only be accessible on the SBS website for the next week, a transcript of the segment has been created for the purposes of this blog and can be referenced here.)

While the segment was framed by the SBS presenters as an opportunity to raise awareness of the issue of Palestinian refugees on the anniversary of Israel's creation, in reality the story had very little to do with Israel.

Go figure

An unattributed Age story (12/5) on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails stated that a "fifth of all Palestinians living under occupation - some 700,00 people - have served time in Israeli jails, according to activist groups."

Although the article did not include the origin of the claim of 700,000, it is a number pushed by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian NGO, and is not credible.

Following my previous blog post about the hypocrisy of media freedom under the Palestinian Authority (PA), new reports reveal that an independent Palestinian television station is facing legal charges over an investigation into corruption allegations at a Palestinian university, after claims that a son of a senior PA official was accepted into the university despite having failed to meet the academic requirements arose. The station in question is Wattan TV, a not-for-profit station founded in 1996 by civil society organisations. According to its mission statement, it "advocates democracy, peace, justice and political pluralism" and "promotes human rights and a transparent government accountable to the Palestinian people". Despite the station's claim that it has evidence to support the allegations, it was sued for one million dollars, and it is feared that its executives could face prison sentences. Imposing crippling legal sanctions on a television station for investigating corruption allegations seem like yet another blow to the 'democracy watchdog'.

The Australian's John Lyons (5/5) reported on an Israeli law passed during the Second Intifada in 2003 designed to prevent terrorists exploiting family reunion laws to enter Israel.

This has meant Israeli Arab Taiseer Khatib's wife, Lana, who is from Jenin on the West Bank, can only stay in Israel on a temporary residency visa, something Khatib denounces as "beyond apartheid".

The newspaper offensively headlined the piece Living under the cloud of Israel's cruel apartheid implying this was a statement of fact rather than Taiseer Khatib's opinion. The online edition has since rectified this error.

Palestinian refugees and the claims made of "right of return" for them have long been a major issue within the debate over a 'just solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The claimed "right of return'" is still seen as a core obstacle to overcome in any future peace negotiations. Yet the refugees question is even more complex. Palestinian refugees actually represent the smaller of the two refugees groups created by the regional conflict between the Arab countries and Israel - the larger group being Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries.

The voices of these Jewish refugees, sadly, have hardly ever been heard or are generally too quickly dismissed. Listening to these voices could potentially shed light and new perspectives not only on the refugees question, but also on the nature and history of the regional context of the conflict. It might even promote reconciliation.

The latest edition of the Weekend Australian has provoked outrage over an offensive and unprofessional headline used to accompany an article by its Middle East correspondent John Lyons that failed to include some vital facts, resulting in some very questionable journalism.

As World Press Freedom Day approaches on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) looks to be headed in the other direction.

The PA has come under widening criticism of late for its worsening record on press freedom (as reported in a recent blog post by Or Avi-Guy). Part of that story centres on a number of Palestinians arrested after making critical comments about the PA or its leaders on Facebook. Now reports say the PA is also blocking off access to critical news websites.

According to the Palestinian Ma'an news agency, Palestinian internet providers have been instructed to block access to news web sites critical of Fatah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In what was was considered another sign of the rapidly deteriorating ties between Israel and Egypt, a visit to Jerusalem by Egyptian Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa -- accompanying Jordanian officials -- caused outrage in Egypt's new Islamist-dominated Parliament last week. The Parliament demanded Gomaa's resignation for behaviour that risked "normalising" relations with Israel.

Despite Gomaa's statements that the visit was unofficial and that it took place under the supervision of the Jordanian authorities, the visit angered those opposed to normalizing relations with Israel.

Parliament Speaker Saad al-Katatny read out...

Give him credit for his candour. In an extensive interview with the Forward published on April 19, Mousa Abu Marzook, Deputy Director of Hamas' political bureau and the group's second-highest-ranking official, told the Jewish newspaper that Hamas would not respect a peace treaty with Israel signed by the Palestinian Authority, even if the agreement was endorsed by a referendum of all Palestinians, as Hamas has always demanded.

Moreover, Abu Marzook vowed that Hamas would never recognise Israel. The most Hamas would consider would be a ceasefire agreement, he said.

This Update features some analysis of the aftermath of the meeting between Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian negotiators last week, where he was given a letter from Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. Also included is a long but informative interview in which Netanyahu discusses several recent controversies in a German newspaper.

Jerusalem Post Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh has recently been writing prolifically on the oppression of the Palestinian people. Unusually for an Arab writer broaching this subject matter, while he does have some criticisms of Israel, the Israelies are not the primary objects of his criticism. In fact, the oppression that he is exposing comes at the hands of the Jordanians, the Syrians and even fellow Palestinians.

One of these pieces noted the redoubled efforts by the Jordanian King to marginalise Jordan's Palestinian population -- which he sees as a threat to his hold on power:

In 2009, Amman quietly began revoking the Jordanian citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, triggering strong protests from human rights organizations and pro-Palestinian groups around the world. ...

This Update deals with the "P5+1" talks with Iran that occurred on Saturday - with reports suggesting little diplomatic progress accomplished beyond agreement to another meeting in five weeks in Baghdad. On a separate issue, it also contains a look a the significance of the planned meeting tonight between Israeli PM Netanyahu and Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad to present a letter outlining the Palestinian position.

During a recent CNN interview, former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defence Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak noted that the all too common perception of an historically high rate of settlement expansion taking place is just wrong - not a single new settlement has been built under the current Netanyahu government. Barak also notes that construction in settlements is actually currently occurring at a slower rate than under previous Israeli governments.

The recent controversy over a house in the West Bank city of Hebron is having severe consequences for one unfortunate Palestinian. There was an outcry when Israeli settlers purchased and moved into a house in the "Arab" section of Hebron, ending with their eviction in a controversial move by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak. While the evicted settlers are unhappy about the result, the man who sold them the house is facing a far worse outcome.

[Muhammad Abu] Shahala  reportedly was sentenced to death for his part in selling what has become known as the Machpela House to a group of Jews. He reportedly confessed to the sale after...

The Middle East Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia), which met in Washington on Wednesday, issued a statement on Middle East peacemaking following the meeting that is notable for its constructive tone.

Hypocrisy frequently rears its ugly head in the Middle East, but the Palestinian Authority (PA) has just succeeded in producing something close to a new examplar on the issue of media freedom. As a Jerusalem Post editorial ("Palestinian responsibility", 2/4/2012) has documented, the Palestinian Authority is intensifying an ongoing crackdown on journalists operating in the West Bank, while at the same time it's introducing a new award honouring press freedom.

Each year thousands of Christians make their way to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter. Israel's Tourism Ministry expects 125,000 visitors during Holy Week and 300,000 throughout April.

Over the weekend as Catholics and Anglicans celebrated Easter, there were media reports that claimed many Palestinian Christians were being denied entry into Jerusalem for their pilgrimage, claims which Israel strongly denies.

A deal signed Tuesday between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas may or may not herald the end to the Gazan fuel shortage as discussed in my previous blog post on the subject, but a recent television interview with Hamas' Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad offers a glimpse into the strain the situation was causing within Hamas...

In its first story since December 2011 looking at Iran's nuclear program, ABC TV "7.30" (21/3) reporter Michael Brissenden described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as "the most powerful Jewish lobby group in the United States". This may surprise the many non-Jews who attended AIPAC's recent annual conference, including pro-Israel Latinos, African-Americans and Christian delegates.

An annual Palestinian day of protest commonly known as Land Day has been rebranded this year as the Palestinian camp seeks to maximize international exposure to their agenda with a "Global March to Jerusalem", scheduled for later today, March 30.

What groups are behind it? There is growing evidence that Iran has a significant role behind the event, as GLORIA Centre analyst Jonathan Spyer wrote for PJ Media this week...

On a family rip back to Australia, Gidon Bromberg, an Australian environmental activist now living in Israel, picked up a copy of Chris Hammer's book The River: A Journey Through The Murray-Darling. Bromberg was inspired by Hammer's description of the process that led to the Federal Government passing legislation in 2007 to protect the river basin; so inspired, in fact, that he decided to bring Hammer to Israel and attempt to replicate the feat and help the long-suffering Jordan River.

Bromberg has written about this in today's Jerusalem Post...

A fuel shortage in Gaza Strip has created some genuine hardships in the Hamas-run entity, affecting power generation as well as transportation. 

The crisis has produced a rare glimpse into the state of play between Hamas, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, as each side has begun blaming one another for the situation, with no role for Israel, except for Hamas to conspiratorially smear against its political opponents.

In four days in early March, well over 200 rockets were fired at southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, injuring several people, sending up to a million Israelis to the bomb shelter, and cancelling school for approximately 200,000 students. Israeli air strikes targeted the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) - the groups responsible for the rocket attacks - killing 25 Palestinians of whom 22 were terrorists, mostly from Islamic Jihad, and many hit in the act of firing rockets.

The violence was triggered when Israel carried out a targeted killing of Zuhair al-Kaissi, the leader of the PRC, whom it said was planning a major attack on Israel through Sinai. This was the fourth major outbreak of conflict around Gaza over the past year. 

The Finkelstein Inquiry into the Australian media has provoked a great deal of comment in the Australian media, most of it critical. And I share the view of the majority of commentators that the major proposal put forward by Finkelstein - for a government-funded body empowered to make legally enforceable and unappealable rulings on any alleged failure to meet agreed standards by any media outlet (including small blogs) - is, at the least, problematic. Any cure worse than the disease would be a mistake.

The "Israel Apartheid Week" festival continues to excite students on campuses across Europe (forget those pesky events in Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Iran). But while Apartheid Week has come and gone for another year, the BDS campaign - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - plods relentlessly on. Why has the Jewish state, the only liberal democracy in the region, become the obsessive focus of vilification, demonisation and delegitimisation? Why is it considered so uniquely evil - a "racist, genocidal state," in the words of one of the leading Israel Apartheid Week celebrants in London?

After a week of intermittent barrages of mortars, rockets, and missiles, relative quiet befell southwestern Israel, in bizarre synchrony with a blessed winter's belated departure.

The weather has been one happy story in Israel this year. After seven years of drought, the skies opened up and by early March, the Water Authority reported that overall rainfall for this year had already exceeded by more than 10% the annual average. 

When Israeli jets pounded the Gaza Strip on March 9-12, in the latest round of major fighting around the enclave, they were not fighting Hamas, Israel's traditional bête noire in Gaza. Though radical factions fired more than 300 rockets at Israel, the self-described Islamic Resistance Movement did not claim responsibility for a single attack. It may be the first time the organisation has refused to lead the charge to battle against Israel.

Hamas has a different fight on its hands. Iran, through the use of its proxies, is fomenting instability in Gaza that it is ill-equipped to handle. Indeed, Teheran is punishing Gaza's de facto rulers for leaving their long-standing alliance.

With the self-confessed murderer, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origins named Mohamed Merah, now having been killed by French police, this Update looks at the aftermath of the horrific shootings of three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, earlier this week. (Some chilling details of the murderers actions at the Ozer HaTorah school, as revealed on security camera footage, are here.)

Over the past weekend, over two hundred rockets were fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, injuring several people, sending up to a million Israelis to the bomb shelter, and canceling school for approximately 200,000 students. Israeli air strikes targeted the Popular Resistance Committee (PRC) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad - the groups responsible for the rocket attacks - killing 26 Palestinians of whom 22 were terrorists, many hit in the act of firing rockets.

Terror sponsorship has been around for as long as terrorism.

It's a phenomenon that has been widely recognised, which allows a group to use terrorism as a tool while insulating themselves from direct responsibility. As an added benefit, in some cases it allows for additional logistical possibilities in planning a terror attack.

Naturally, nobody should be fooled: a terror sponsor who provides planning and support for a terror attack is as responsible as those who are sent to pull the trigger.

As has been widely reported in the Australian press today, on Wednesday the Guardian went public with a trove of messages that they had obtained which purportedly had been mined out of Syrian President Bashar Assad's personal email account.

What was less widely reported was that, as a key strategy, in the emails the Iranians told the Alawite Assad to shore up his image among the country's majority Sunni Muslim population by fashioning himself as an uncompromising opponent of concessions to Israel and as a defender of Jerusalem.

The United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has done it again - in its annual session it condemned only one country - Israel, while ignoring the human rights violations of women around the world, including especially the current crisis in Syria - where women are being raped and murdered...

Just days after being exposed for fraudulently blaming the accidental death of a 15-year-old boy on an "Israeli airstrike", Hamas officials have again attempted to implicate Israel in the death of a Gaza youth -- this time, seven-year-old Baraka al-Mughrabi. Just after Mughrabi passed-away last night, reports started emerging that he had been killed by an Israeli strike.

Not long after, however, these remarks were retracted as the truth of his death emerged...

Israel, which has sometimes been criticised in the media for targeting terror kingpins in Gazan airstrikes, has received a validation of the policy's effectiveness in curbing terrorism from an unlikely source: A Gazan university professor.

Mukhaimer Abu Saada, professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, told the AFP in an article published March 12 that Israel's strategy has been very successful.

The Kony2012 campaign was not the only viral campaign in recent days that spread some dubious information. A number of allegations of Israeli targeting of civilians that surface over the past few days have been outed as downright lies.

The most glaring example is the death of 15-year-old Nayif Shaaban Qarmout, who was killed in northern Gaza on Monday. The first reports emerged from Palestinian Authority-controlled media outlet Ma'an News, citing unnamed "witnesses" who attested that the boy was hit by an Israeli airstrike.

The claim caught the eye of the Israeli military, who were understandably confused, given that they had not launched any airstrikes on northern Gaza during the time that he was killed. An AFP reporter confirmed that there did not appear to be any evidence of an airstrike in the area, but the dead boy did seem to have been killed by an explosive device, albeit apparently one that he himself was carrying...

This Update deals with background to and details of the intensive flare-up over the weekend around Gaza, which saw over 200 rockets fired into southern Israel from Gaza (sending up to 1 million Israelis into bomb shelters) and Israel staging numerous counter-attacks at terrorist targets and rocket sites which reportedly killed around 25 Palestinians, all but three of them armed combatants, according to Israel. The violence was triggered on Friday when Israel assassinated Zuhair al-Qaissi, the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), and an assistant, who Israel said were planning attacks into Israel from Sinai...

While the fractured rule of the Fatah-dominated PA in the West Bank and the Hamas-led Gaza Strip has been an obstacle to a two-state peace solution with Israel, it does not follow that this move towards Palestinian unification will improve the chances for peace. On the contrary, though the prospect of a functioning Palestinian unity government is by no means assured and indeed looks like being postponed yet again, even if it can be realised, any such government may carry with it dangerous implications...

Context is king and without it the most outrageous slurs can be given legitimacy.

Unfortunately, some pro-Palestinian activists are prone to only offer facts in isolation to give their false allegations the air of authenticity and aid the ongoing campaign to delegitimise Israel.

The most recent example of this appeared on Tuesday in an op-ed hosted on the ABC "Unleashed" website from Professor Stuart Rees called "Palestine matters, not Gillard-Rudd soapies"...

As official estimates of Syrian civilians killed in the Assad regime's bloody crackdown climb steadily past the 7,500 mark, a couple of recent Op-Eds in the Arab media have compared the Arab world's strong outrage to Israeli military actions in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon to their muted response to Syrian slaughter of their own people.

Putting aside the moral inequality of such a comparison (the pieces make no effort to differentiate the defensive nature of Israeli military campaigns from the cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Syrian dictatorial regime suppressing dissent from its own citizens) the pieces nevertheless mark a significant break from the traditional narrative in Arab media that the Palestinians are the region's principal human rights victims...

This Update features two new and penetrating analyses of the ructions and political disagreements currently roiling Hamas, as well as an important new expression of Israel's dilemmas vis-a-vis Iran's nuclear program in the lead up to Israeli PM Netanyahu's trip to Washington next week.

First up is the always excellently informed top Israeli journalist, Ehud Yaari, sorting out the power struggles within Hamas. Yaari says that the once unassailable Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal now seems to be in deep trouble, cut off from a base of operations and with increasingly public denunciations of his policies from within Hamas' senior ranks...

Recently, detailed accounts were published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of the January round of Israeli-Palestinian "negotiations about negotiating" held in Amman, Jordan.

According to the Haaretz account, Israeli negotiators offered a somewhat vague but important statement of the principles which would underly a peace agreement to include a Palestinian state in the vast majority of the West Bank plus Gaza - one which Haaretz described as "similar, if not identical to that which was presented by [then Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni during the negotiations that took place in 2008 after the Annapolis Conference."

On February 6, 2012, Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal signed a new agreement to create a Palestinian national unity government for the West Bank and Gaza.

The Doha Declaration, like previous Fatah-Hamas agreements, emphasises the need to implement the agreements between the sides - once again demonstrating the difficulty of achieving institutional unity in the Palestinian arena in light of Hamas' declared ambition to assume senior status in representing the Palestinian people. The two sides will have to show great creativity to overcome the many obstacles facing the holding of elections, from unifying the separate civilian and security institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, to budget allocations.

While peacemaking visionaries talk about a future Israeli-Palestinian peace dividend - the concept that peace between Israelis and Palestinians will usher in a new era of mutual prosperity - the two peoples aren't waiting, as both Israeli and Palestinian stock markets continue to impress.

On February 20, the financial news organisation Bloomberg named Israel's stock market number one in the world in its Riskless Return Ranking - a measure of the safest investments for investors over the past decade...

Did you hear the one about the shipments of fuel from Egypt to Gaza stopped by Hamas because they refused to let them pass through the Israeli crossing at Rafah?

No? Well, that's because stories of Palestinian suffering caused by Hamas and Fatah rarely make the grade in most Australian and Western newsrooms. It's a case of news editors saying: "No Israel angle? Then there's nothing to see here folks"...

The large crash sounded like something very big and heavy had fallen, hard - at least for those of us at the front of the bus. One friend at the back had grabbed his girlfriend and gone for cover, the loud bang and shattering glass made him think of a gunshot. Thankfully, we were not under fire. We were, however, under attack.

We were 13 Australian students on a tour through Arab East Jerusalem, there to learn about the situation in which the local population finds itself. Our bus was a clearly marked tour bus (albeit from an Israeli company) of a kind that is hardly rare in one of the world's most popular cities for tourists. We had nothing at all to identify us as anything other than Western tourists and, at that moment, we were between stops and not even paying much attention to our surroundings. What, then, motivated a local youth with an impressive arm to hurtle rocks at us as we drove past?

With the Syrian city of Homs dominating news from the Middle East as shelling there continues, (excellent reporting on the ground from Homs comes from Richard Spencer of the London Telegraph - see here and here.)  and international calls for action to put a stop to the bloodshed in Syria growing, this Update looks at some careful analysis of what could be done, and what could not be done, if a decision to intervene was made...

A political storm in Malaysia over controversial remarks by opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's on Israel has not yet come to a close.

Back in January, a war of words erupted between Anwar and several top government officials, including his former mentor Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, regarding Malaysia's policy on Israel - a raw nerve among the country's Muslim-majority population...

PROPAGANDA comes in many forms. The British/French mini-series, The Promise, recently shown over four consecutive Sundays on SBS TV, is a particularly insidious example. It tells the story of a British girl, Erin, just out of school, who stays with the family of her closest friend in Israel during the second intifada.

She has taken the diary of her grandfather Len, who served as a British soldier in mandate Palestine from 1945 to 1948, so the action switches between the British battling the treacherous Jews in the 1940s and the brutal Israelis oppressing the Palestinians today.

Following up on yesterday's post on the extreme statements of Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyah in Iran, The Jerusalem Post reports that Haniyeh made some additional extreme statements on his final day in the country - vowing Hamas will continue to rely on violence against Israel and reject compromise.

In the aftermath of the recent Qatari-brokered reconciliation agreement between Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, many have suggested that Hamas is moderating both its long-standing goals of Israel's destruction and its traditional rejection of any negotiations with Israel. But Hamas' leadership in Gaza, spearheaded Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, has been making it very clear that they do not support any such change...

Literally Earth-shattering, according to Iranian state media outlet Press TV:

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the powerful feelings of the regional nations towards Gaza have been instrumental in the eruption of the region's volcano.

There is, of course, a chance that he was speaking figuratively, although this would not be the first time an Iranian cleric linked a natural disaster with global politics. There was, for instance, those earthquakes two years ago caused by promiscuous women, or the time that European countries stole Iran's rain, leading to a widespread drought. The more sinister part of Khamenei's statement, which emerged from a recent meeting with Ismail Haniyeh -- Hamas' leader in Gaza -- concerned Iranian support to Hamas...

It's time to clear the air on an issue which has been the source of a misinformation campaign for years - Israel's environmental record in the West Bank...

This Update is dedicated to the latest Fatah-Hamas unity agreement, signed in Doha, Qatar on Monday, which calls for current PA President Mahmoud Abbas to also become Prime Minister.

First up is Robert Danin from the Council on Foreign Relations, who examines the actual significance of this agreement, the latest of many, as well as the key questions that will have to be settled if the agreement is to stick. He is sceptical Abbas can succeed with Hamas and says Abbas is likely to have to make the tough choice between the two he has been seeking to avoid.

Why does the United Nations continue to consider the Gaza Strip to be "occupied territory" when Israel dismantled all settlements and withdrew the IDF from the area as part of its disengagement in September 2005?

Even Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since it overthrew the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, concedes that Gaza is no longer occupied...

Daily summary of news stories that readers may have missed otherwise.

While they come from opposing Muslim factions, Palestinian Sunni group Hamas and Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah have much in common: they are both designated terror organisations in most Western countries, Australia included; they both hold extremist and violent ideologies; they both fought wars with Israel in the second half of the last decade; and they have both received significant backing from Iran and Syria. That said, they seem to be diverging on that last point. With the ongoing violence in Syria, the last Hamas operative from the Damascus-based political bureau seems to have fled for Gaza, however it seems that Hezbollah is unwilling to follow suit and remains resolutely behind the ruling Assad regime...

An AFP report yesterday indicated that, as predicted, Hamas and Fatah are dragging their feet on actually implementing the latest reconciliation deal.

This suggests that the current deal will go the way of the three previous deals: all have been introduced to much fanfare and then quietly lapsed as, once away from the public eye, no agreement could be reached on how to actually implement the requirements. The reason for this is that while "Palestinian unity" as an idea is appealing to both factions, they...

To its great discredit, the Melbourne Age has republished a Guardian newspaper feature that alleges mistreatment by the Israeli judicial system of West Bank Palestinian youths detained on suspicion of terrorism.

As a previous AIJAC blog post revealed, many allegations of Palestinian children being tortured, kept in solitary confinement, denied legal representation, and forced to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, rely on half-truths, manipulation of facts and figures and unsubstantiated claims by anti-Israel organisations.

That is, organisations with anti-Israel political agendas that extend beyond the remit of the specific goals they profess to be concerned with and into areas of delegitimising the Jewish state.

Two news stories emerged today, both reporting positive steps forward in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The first of these concerns an online conference being held by a group called YaLa-Young Leaders, designed to bring people together from both sides and have a productive conversation about the conflict, hoping to form some genuine reconciliation efforts.

As Kel Si Loos reported in the Miami Herald, the group has been attracting a large number of members from the Middle East and...

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas swung through Europe in January he was feted by European leaders for pursuing the two-state formula, while obloquy was, as usual, heaped on Israel - if not for settlements then for roadblocks or water or the wall or the tunnel or the occupation or, most recently, for being niggardly about handing out citizenship on demand to Palestinians... the list goes on.

Lead Israeli negotiator Yitzhak Molcho met with his Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat in Amman on January 9 for the second time in as many weeks, with the aim of restarting direct peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. These were the first direct contacts between the parties since the breakdown of peace talks in September 2010.

The claim of Israel maliciously depriving Palestinians of water, in order to steal more for its own citizens, has been often repeated amongst Israel's critics. To Jerusalem Post blogger Petra Marquardt-Bigman, the accusation is reminiscent of Medieval accusations of Jews poisoning water supplies:

I think of it as the "water libel" because it often echoes the medieval accusations that Jews were poisoning wells.

Most recently, it surfaced in a formal report by the French parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, which described...

This update looks at the latest sanctions imposed by the US and European Union on Iran’s oil industry and Central Bank; how an Islamist-controlled Egyptian Parliament will affect the country's ties with Israel; and the chances of Hamas winning Palestinian elections mooted to be held in May.

This weekend's Fairfax papers included a report on an all-female Palestinian racing team by Ruth Pollard. While the piece was an interesting read overall, there are one or two small inconsistencies that are worth noting. In addition to this, there were a number of instances where the Age inserted small changes to make the tone of the article seem more anti-Israel. Some of these have been noted below.

Pollard profiles Noor Daoud, a Palestinian woman who won an Israeli formula-three competition last month. In the interview, Daoud explains how it is that she can no longer drive on the road.

''It is not the first time I have driven 200km/h - I lost my licence in 2009 when...

According to a recent AP report, after facing criticism from Israeli Knesset members for hosting two Hamas MPs at its recent conference, the International Parliamentary Union (IPU) has reportedly apologised to Israel.

Israel objected because the militant group has killed hundreds of Israelis in attacks over the years. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the EU. and U.S.

The union's secretary-general, Anders Johnsson...

It is lucky that freedom of speech is not the main selling point for Palestinian statehood because the stabbing of a human rights activist in Gaza who dared criticise the Hamas government and resistance groups would undermine the enterprise’s bona fides.

Mahmud Abu Rahma, international relations director at the al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, was “stabbed multiple times by several masked attackers on Friday evening”, according to an AFP report.

This Updates leads with two articles on the likely policies of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood now that it has won the parliamentary election, gaining approximately 41% of seats with other Islamist groups taking the Islamist bloc up to something like 2/3 of all seats.

First up is Washington Institute expert on Egyptian politics Eric Trager, looking at the likely agenda of the Brotherhood in power. He says that the agenda will be theocracy internally, and confrontation internationally, and that expectations that the group will moderate are very unlikely to be met - offering some behavioural evidence for this.

The last two weeks have seen two meetings in Amman Jordan between Israeli and Palestinian representatives, in what are being called "preparatory talks", but are the first direct public contacts between the two sides since 2010. (Some more details on the latest rounds of talks are reported here, here and here.)

A good backgrounder from BICOM on both the significance of the talks and the political factors influencing them is first up. It puts the meetings in the context of the Quartet efforts to restart talks and significant pressure on the Palestinian side to renew negotiations, and discusses what is known about the contents of the two meetings.

Recently Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader in Damascus, agreed during reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas on December 22, that "there will be no military resistance" and also agreed that "the permanent solution is on the ‘67 borders." Abbas and Meshaal also agreed to a new temporary leadership for the PLO, for the first time in tandem with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

However, it is unclear both the extent to which Meshaal accepts what Abbas said they agreed to and more importantly, whether Meshaal is speaking for Hamas - as many in Hamas have openly denied this new strategy, suggesting a rift between the Hamas leadership in Syria and the Gaza strip.

A Palestinian human rights activist has inadvertently confirmed what Israel has always insisted, that terrorist groups live, train, operate and run riot throughout the Gaza Strip's residential neighbourhoods.

In a piece written for the Palestinian website Maan, Gaza human rights activist Mahmoud Abu Rahma reveals that the "resistance movements" are so entrenched and widespread in residential areas that civilians are suffering frequent injuries because of their activities.

A young Italian journalist named Ruben Salvadori has prepared a film about how he and other photojournalists reporting from the West Bank not only report what they see but help to create the clashes and dramatic scenes which helps them sell photographs...

This document looks at the Israeli legal process regarding Palestinian minors in the West Bank (hereinafter, the "Area") accused of using stones as weapons, including a specific analysis of a recent two month period, August and September 2011.

Two recent stories in the Australian newspaper by Middle East correspondent John Lyons - "Stone cold justice" (Weekend Australian Magazine, Nov. 26) http://tinyurl.com/6puavp9 and "Rudd seeks action on torture allegations involving Palestinian children" (Australian, Dec. 17) http://tinyurl.com/6rdzqjr - have generated a degree of controversy about Israel's judicial treatment of Palestinian minors in the West Bank accused of using stones and rocks as weapons.

On Dec. 3, the Australian published an opinion piece from NGO Monitor's Gerald Steinberg that provides context for the treatment of Palestinian minors and largely disputes the substance of the claims made in Lyons' stories. Steinberg's article can be read here - http://tinyurl.com/7m6j3wf...

Despite its claimed opposition to terrorism, the PA continues to glorify terrorists.

This was reinforced again when Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas met with freed Palestinian terrorist Amna Muna in Turkey on December 21, along with ten other Palestinians freed and exiled to Turkey as part of the deal to release kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in October.

Muna is a 35-year-old West Bank woman who was serving a life sentence for using an Internet promise of romance to lure 16-year-old Israeli Ophir Rahum to the West Bank, where he was killed by waiting militants in 2001.

According to a PA statement Abbas "praised the prisoners for remaining steadfast in the face of Israeli wardens' mastery."

Today's Update features three pieces looking at the choices currently being made by  the Palestinian political leadership - both those associated with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah in the West Bank, and with Hamas in Gaza.

First up is veteran Israeli Palestinian affairs analyst Pinhas Inbari, who looks at the push by Fatah and PA head Mahmoud Abbas for preparations for the election scheduled for May in which he says he will not run. Inbari notes that Fatah seems to be resisting Abbas' call to name a successor candidate and argues this is because Fatah is totally ill-prepared for either succession or elections.

There is good reason for being sceptical of reports suggesting Hamas is shifting from armed resistance to non-violent resistance and will settle for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders.

Both Palestinian groups and pro-Palestinian Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) often accuse Israel of seeking to "Judaise" Jerusalem. For instance, following their admission to the UN cultural organisation UNESCO in October, one of the things the Palestinian Authority said they wanted to do was sue Israel in international forums for supposedly "systematically destroying and forging Arab and Islamic culture in Jerusalem." Similarly, at a controversial rally in Cairo on November 25 at which there was also recitation of a hadith [saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad] about killing all Jews, Sheikh Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of al-Azhar University, proclaimed, "we shall not allow the Zionists to Judaise al-Quds (Jerusalem)."

In December 2011, reports from several directions converged to suggest that Hamas is abandoning the sinking ship of Syria: that many senior cadres have already settled in Gaza and only the upper echelon of leadership that bears symbolic meaning still remains in Damascus. By and large those reports are correct. At the same time, Iran has cut its subsidy to Hamas, which now relies mostly on revenues from commerce through the smuggling tunnels, which can hardly support the Gazan economy.

There has been much written about the impasse in restarting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in recent years. Most recently, US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta sparked controversy at the Brookings Institute on Dec. 2 when, following a speech, he was asked about what steps Israel "should take now" to move toward peace and replied "Just get to the damn table."

It wasn't even close. In fact it was a "landslide". That is how pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting describes its decision to bestow the Guardian newspaper the 2011 "Dishonest Reporting Award" for its relentless anti-Israel coverage.

Readers of Fairfax newspapers will be familiar with the Guardian's news stories and one-sided selection of opinion pieces via their regular appearance in the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.

SBS TV showed a four-part drama, "The Promise", from Britain's Channel 4 and France's Canal+ and Arte France, which was characterised by rampant and crudely propagandistic political messages directed against Israel and Jews, selective, distorted portrayals of historical events, and the sanitising of Arab behaviour throughout the past seven decades.

This Update features two pieces on how Damascus-dependent terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah have coped with the possible loss of President Bashar al-Assad as a key ally in the wake of the recent unrest in Syria.

First up is veteran Israeli Arab Affairs analyst Pinhas Inbari, who looks at Hamas' situation in the wake of the uncertain future in Syria and also Egypt. He notes that the leadership of Hamas is quite happy to be moving its alliance from Damascus to a Cairo dominated by their Muslim Brotherhood allies, as looks likely to eventuate.

Today both the Age and Sydney Morning Herald published an article by Harriet Sherwood regarding Israel's plans to relocate the Jahalin Bedouin from their camps on land which they do not own to a permanent Bedouin town.

The article, originally published in the Guardian does not provide a balanced understanding of the issues at hand. The Bedouin are living on land to which they have no legal title that has been within the municipal boundaries of Ma'aleh Adumim since 1977. Relocation has been periodically discussed with the Bedouin since the 1980s...

The US ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, has shown breathtaking ignorance, insensitivity and naivety by blaming Israel for Arab and Muslim antisemitism in Europe.

Despite the widely-trumpeted new reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah, the two factions appear to remain irreconcilable.

... The Palestinian Authority (PA) itself seems to resent these accusations of reliance on Israel. This was made clear by Adli Sadeq, the PA's ambassador to India, in an article written for PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. The article, translated by Palestine Media Watch, unequivocally rejects the "common mistake or misconception" that the PA in any way recognises the right of Israel to exist. As Sadeq explains, this is merely a line of thinking that Israelis have "fooled themselves" into following...

Following on from this post concerning an accusation of Israel supposedly "pinkwashing" its public image by spruiking its record on gay rights to hide alleged injustices, a number of gay writers have penned scathing responses in the Jewish and international media.

Writing in the Forward, Jay Michaelson gives a critique of the piece by Sarah Schulman in the New York Times that began the whole kerfuffle...

On 29 November 64 years ago, the UN General Assembly voted on the partition plan, and the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 was adopted by a vote of 33 to 13, recommending the establishment of two states - Arab and Jewish. The Jews accepted the partition plan, the Arabs did not and five Arab states went to war with Israel.

However, November 29, is not called ‘Israel day' but rather the ‘International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People'. Marking this day at the UN was a General Assembly resolution on the "Question of Palestine" which condemned Israel, pre-empted the results of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and failed to acknowledge Israel's legitimate security rights, amongst other concerning features of the resolution.

In response to the UN resolution, Ron Prosor, UN Representative to Israel delivered a stirring speech that condemned the UN's consistent attack on Israel and outlined the real reasons that have so far prevented peace...

On Sunday night, SBS-TV screened the first of four episodes of a controversial British historical drama set in pre-state and contemporary Israel, entitled "The Promise". When it was screened in Britain by Channel 4 in February, it led to an official letter of complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, as well as strong critiques from Booker prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson, noted British academic expert on the Holocaust David Cesarani, and others....

I include below some of the critiques of "The Promise" from Britain for the benefit of Australian audiences.

Rioting in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011 unleashed a tidal wave of unrest across the Arab world that was soon designated the "Arab Spring." Enthusiasts in the West hailed a new birth of freedom for a giant slice of humanity that has been living in despotic darkness for centuries. But historians in 50 or a hundred years may well point to the 1979 events in Teheran - the Islamist revolution that toppled the Shah - as the real trigger of this so-called "spring" (which is looking more and more like a deep, forbidding winter). And the Islamist Hamas victory in the Palestinian general elections of 2006 and that organisation's armed takeover of the Gaza Strip the following year probably signified further milestones on the same path.

World-renowned Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz gave an important speech at "The Perils of Global Intolerance: the United Nations and Durban III" conference that took place on 22 September 2011 - designed to coincide with and counter the UN Durban III conference which promoted an anti-Zionist agenda and focussed on Israel as the world's sole nation mentioned as a source of "racism." It has just been made publicly available.

In his speech Dershowitz condemned the UN for failing to live up to its own Charter, and began his speech with this statement:

"One important reason why there is no peace in the Middle East an be summarised in tragically in two letters - U.N. That building dedicated in theory to peace has facilitated terrorism, stood idly by genocide, given a platform to Holocaust deniers, and disincentivised the Palestinians from negotiating a reasonable two state solution."

Fast becoming a viral sensation, a new YouTube video (below) shows two Spanish men "photobombing" an al-Jazeera broadcast by engaging in a long, passionate kiss in frame as the reporter is talking. 

The irony of the video is that while the two were supposedly making a point about marriage equality in Spain, they happened to do so on a state-owned network from a country in which homosexuality is punishable by lashings and imprisonment. Indeed, a report from the UN High Commission for Refugees has this to say on homosexuality in Qatar:

Homosexual behavior is illegal [in Qatar]. Islamic laws against homosexuality are applied. [In Qatari society], homosexuality is taboo. There is no visible social support for gay and lesbian rights.

On the topic of homosexuality in the Middle East, Sarah Shulman has written in the New York Times on the prominence of the gay community in Israel and Israeli officials speaking out against the intolerance shown to homosexuals in...

One of the many admirable characteristics of the Australian archetype is a propensity for plain speaking.

So it is to Prime Minister Julia Gillard's credit that Australia sent the Palestinian Authority a clear message by voting against admitting the non-existent state of Palestine to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In essence Australia was reaffirming its repeated stance that the only way to end the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is through negotiations.

As it is, the Palestinians will now apply to 16 other UN affiliated bodies for admission on the specious basis of being a state, which they are not yet according to the criteria set out under international law.

Former DFAT head Richard Woolcott wrote a piece for the Age (11/11) critical of Australia's vote against Palestinian membership of UNESCO. Having spent more than half his article setting out the merits of Australia obtaining a seat on the UN Security Council, he then wrote, "In these circumstances, I find it both surprising and a decisive setback to our election prospects that the Prime Minister decided Australia should vote against the admission of Palestine to UNESCO."

A media stunt by a group of Palestinians trying to falsely tar Israel as an apartheid state not only caused some in the fourth estate to fall hook, line and sinker but to abrogate basic journalistic standards.

Six Palestinians called The West Bank Freedom Riders cynically tried to lay claim to the legacy and imagery of African Americans who fought against segregation in the 1950s/60s in the United States by "proving" they are banned from using Israeli public buses to cross over from the West Bank into Jerusalem.

But an analysis by Simon Plosker from Honest Reporting of the claims made by the six "Freedom Riders" and the media coverage shows the absurdity of the stunt and how easily it could be proved as dishonest propaganda.

A constant talking point on the Middle East is that Israeli building in settlements in the West Bank is supposedly taking up more and more land and supposedly making Palestinian statehood unviable...

So how much of the West Bank is covered by settlements?..

The Palestinians appear to have failed in their bid to even force the US to veto a UN Security Council decision to recognise them as a UN member state, and seem a bit confused about their next step. PA President Mahmoud Abbas seems to be now pushing for a unity government with Hamas following secret talks in Cairo. He is planning to meet Hamas head Khaled Meshaal next week, and it seems likely PA Prime Minister Salem Fayyad may be forced out of office.

This Update deals with the general state of play in terms of where the Palestinian could head next.

Australians should be proud of the fact that our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have consistently and publicly supported, with bipartisan agreement, a genuine, negotiated two-state resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This is why Australia wisely voted against the admission of Palestine to UNESCO and why Australia should vote against Palestinian 'statehood' if and when it comes to the United Nations General Assembly.

Eric Falt, assistant director general for external relations and public information at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has issued an official letter of protest from UNESCO's director general, Irina Bokova regarding a cartoon which UNESCO claimed constituted incitement.

This could have been an encouraging sign that UNESCO is finally acting against incitement, racism and specifically antisemitism prevalent in Arab and Muslim media, especially in the state-sponsored press. However, the cartoon that so inflamed UNESCO officials was published in Haaretz, an Israeli independent newspaper, which is protected under Israel's laws regarding freedom of the press. Moreover, the only incitement that seemed to concern UNESCO is incitement against UNESCO.

Just after the Palestinian Authority admitted that they are not going to win the votes needed to secure UN Security Council recognition as a state, a report prepared for the Security Council on the subject has been leaked to the media. The report, written by the UN's Committee For the Admission of New Members, has has been leaked to American Arabic news network Al Hurra and published by Foreign Policy's Colum Lynch. The general impression from the report is that the Committee was unable to determine whether or not Palestine can qualify for statehood, but there were a few points that were a little curious.

For starters, see if you can pick what stands out from the following paragraph...

A breaking report from the AP reveals that the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Malki, has admitted that they have failed to muster the nine votes needed in the UN Security Council in order to approve their statehood bid.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki told The Associated Press Tuesday, "It is clear now, with the U.S. counter effort and intervention, that we are not going to have these nine votes." They can still apply to the General Assembly.

That the US has been campaigning strongly against the bid is unsurprising given the difficult situation that the PA has been placing the Obama administration in through its recent UN antics...

The acceptance of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was criticised within the UN by none other than the Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

In an interview during the G20 summit in Cannes, France, he warned against further attempts by the Palestinians to join other UN bodies and agencies and stated that such efforts are "not beneficial for Palestine and not beneficial for anybody." He warned that "millions and millions" of people could be affected if UN agencies suffer budget cuts as a result of the Palestinian bids: "This will have implications for all the agencies of the United Nations. When an organisation is not properly functioning because of a lack of resources, you have to think about the millions and millions of people who are being impacted and affected," he said.

Ban's concerns are based on actions by the United States and Canada, which contributed 25% of UNESCO's funding, and have cut off their funding following the PA vote.

On Wednesday a flotilla of two ships - the Canadian ship Tahrir and the Irish ship Saoirse quietly left a Turkish port with the aim to breach the Gaza blockade by Friday.

News of this latest flotilla "Freedom Waves to Gaza" was kept secret until the ships reached international waters.

According to the organisers, the 27 activists on board came from Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United States, and included Palestinians and at least one Israeli Arab citizen.

This Update features two comments on the vote by the UN Educational, Social and Culture Organisation (UNESCO) to admit "Palestine" as a full member on Monday, a measure opposed by the Australia (see AIJAC's media release on the Australian vote here).  It also contains some comments on reports originating in the Israeli press alleging that the Israeli Government is stepping up preparations for a possible military strike on Iran's nuclear program.

A whole series of events last night made an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities suddenly seem far closer than had previously been the case. After a week of speculation in the Israeli press, Haaretz reported yesterday that the Prime Minister and Defence Minister are trying to gain cabinet support for a strike.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to muster a majority in the cabinet in favor of military action against Iran, a senior Israeli official has said. According to the official, there is a "small advantage" in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.

Netanyahu and Barak recently persuaded Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who previously objected to attacking Iran, to support such a move.

This report coincided with the test-firing of a new long-range Israeli missile, which could be capable of reaching targets in Iran...

As Fairfax's Ruth Pollard reported this morning, now that they have been admitted to UNESCO, the Palestinian Authority (PA) will begin pushing for heritage protection of holy sites in the West Bank.

JERUSALEM: Significant religious sites throughout the West Bank, including the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem and Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, will be among the first to be pushed forward for world heritage status now Palestine has been granted membership of UNESCO.

A Palestinian Authority spokesman there were many sites and shrines in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that until now had been unprotected because of a lack of recognition and funding.

''Now we will be able to protect them and make sure they are known around the world,'' he said. ''We believe that becoming a member of the UNESCO is an overdue right for a country that has such a significant amount of heritage sites.''

This follows from a bid launched earlier this year to gain heritage status for the Church of Nativity, believed to be the site where Jesus was born. The idea of the PA being responsible for the care of this church and other non-Muslim holy sites should raise a few eyebrows amongst those who are even vaguely familiar with their recent history...

South African Judge Richard Goldstone has written an op-ed in this New York Times on 31 October condemning the false allegation that Israel is an ‘apartheid' state. He writes:

"The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony."

This is the same Goldstone who did a great deal of damage to Israel by lending his name to the biased UN fact-finding mission into the Gaza conflict in 2009 which condemned Israel for deliberately killing civilians and war crimes while all but ignoring the Palestinian rocket attacks into Israel.

Goldstone later recanted his support for the report after realising that much of the information relied upon in the ‘Goldstone Report' was not credible and biased. In an op-ed in the Washington Post in April this year he stated, "if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

The decision of the General Assembly of UNESCO to "further the folly and fiction" that there is a State of Palestine which can participate in international organisations "undermines genuine progress towards peace", the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council said today, while stressing that "it is heartening to see that the Australian government was not party to the cynical and destructive political decision".

"The Palestinian leadership is fully aware that they do not control a 'State' and rather than work on state-building and peace building are indulging in self-defeating grandstanding" Mark Leibler, National Chairman of AIJAC said.

The admission of Palestine into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, little more than a symbolic victory for the Palestinian Authority (PA), has severe repercussions on the largest funder of both the PA and UNESCO: The United States. As AFP has reported, US legislation prevents US funding of any UN body that admits the Palestinians as a member.

"We were to have made a $US60 million ($A57.11 million) payment to UNESCO in November and we will not be making that payment," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters on Monday.

Nuland said the Palestinian admission "triggers longstanding (US) legislative restrictions which will compel the United States to refrain from making contributions to UNESCO."...

Finally Gilad Shalit, who became known in Israel as ‘everyone's son', has returned home. His liberation led to what can only be called a sense of national euphoria across the Jewish state.

The costs to gain his release after five years of captivity were, objectively, enormous. Among the 1,027 prisoners freed were those estimated to have the blood of 599 people, mostly civilians, on their hands. They include the masterminds of some of the most horrific terror bombings in Israeli history.

The Gilad Shalit deal led to the release of many heinous murderers, and one cannot but feel enormous sympathy for the distress this caused the families of those they murdered.

But if there is one individual who symbolises the incomprehensibly ugly belief system, the determination to murder at all costs, behind the Palestinian cult of suicide terrorism, it is female releasee Wafa al-Bis.

Four hundred and seventy seven Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel in the deal to free IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, held captive by Hamas since 2006, with another 550 to be released in November. The prisoners include some of the most notorious terrorists perpetrators against Israel including individuals involved in the Sbarro and Café Moment suicide bombings, murderers of Nachshon Wachsman and the videotaped October 2000 lynching of IDF reservists Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami in Ramallah.

According to AP reports, the Palestinian Authority (PA) envoy to Canada, Linda Sobeh Ali, was recalled yesterday after she tweeted a link to a Youtube video calling upon "millions" to "destroy the Jews".

Of course, the Canadian Authorities were very hostile towards the video and pressured the PA into recalling Ali. The PA, however, not only made excuses for the poem but went on to blame the "Jewish Lobby" for having to bring their envoy home.

Joseph Lavoie, a spokesman for Canada's foreign affairs minister, said Monday it was a serious enough matter for the Palestinian Authority that they recalled Sobeh Ali...

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Many reactions in the Palestinian street and media to the release of prisoners in exchange for the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit reveal a worrying and disturbing narrative of glorification of the returning terrorists and support for their heinous crimes and violent ways. Calls for future abductions of Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips for future prisoner releases were also common.

Kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is free after five years and four months in captivity in Gaza, and the elation in Israel is overwhelming. (An excellent collection of news and analysis on the release and its aftermath has been assembled by Britain's Telegraph. Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu's remarks welcoming Shalit home are here.) This Update focuses on the significance and aftermath of his release.

Interviewed last night by ABC Lateline's Ali Moore, former Haaretz editor David Landau, who once infamously told then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he wished to see Israel "raped" in a US intervention forcibly imposing a settlement to the conflict, expressed his horror at the "weakness" that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is displaying to the world. According to Landau, Netanyahu did so through his sudden reversal of his previous refusal to agree to a prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit.

I find myself in a strange and invidious situation because I'm not naturally of the right. I'm very much of the peace camp of the side of the sort of, so to speak, political spectrum that's always encouraged dealing with the Palestinians in the hope of making a final peace deal with the Palestinians, yet I find myself frankly horrified and, as an Israeli, also mortified by this shameless turnabout by the prime minister, Mr Netanyahu...

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As the five-year hostage ordeal of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit draws to a close, we offer up some of the standout commentary from the last week on the merits of the deal reached by the Israeli government with Hamas.

The tension in the debate concerns the personal interest and the national interest and how these two forces interact have caused intense heartache and headaches for Israel.

Israel released the names of the Palestinian prisoners to be released in deal to free IDF soldier Gilad Shalit who has been held captive by Hamas since 2006. The prisoners include some of the most notorious terrorists perpetrators against Israel including individuals involved in the Sbarro and Café Moment suicide bombings, murderers of Nachshon Wachsman and the video taped October 2000 lynch of IDF reservists Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami in Ramallah.

Yesterday, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected four petitions against the prisoner swap deal to free Shalit. The petitions were filed by the Almagor Terror Victims Association and relatives of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks.

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Media commentators on the Palestinian prisoner swap deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas have at times wrongly insinuated that there is a degree of moral equivalence on both sides.

For example, in Ruth Pollard's "Israel names prisoners to be free" on The Age (17/10/2011), she writes:

"For Palestinians, who have at least 6000 loved ones in Israeli prisons, some for serious crimes, some for political activism and many held without charge or trial, the release of 1027 is not enough. Anxious relatives of prisoners gathered in town squares throughout the West Bank at the weekend, holding photographs of family members and praying their names would be on the list of those to be released."

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It would appear that there is no room for Jews in the Arab Spring.

Last year, before the Arab Spring, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas caused outrage when she recommended that Israeli Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else."

As an American of Lebanese descent, the 89-year-old Thomas should have known that the Arab Middle East was home to approximately 850,000 Jews known as Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews for thousands of years.

It won't stop the revisionist propaganda underpinning the Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence campaign, but newspaper accounts from 1949 prove that the nascent State of Israel supported the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and opposed the land being absorbed by surrounding Arab countries.

The Israeli Government confirmed that a deal has been reached with Hamas for the release of 25-year-old IDF soldier Gilad Shalit - kidnapped by Hamas on 25 June 2006 - in exchange for 1027 Palestinian prisoners.

As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced:

"In the coming days we will return Gilad to the bosom of his parents, Aviva and Noam, to his brother Yoel, his sister Hadas, his grandfather Tzvi and the entire people of Israel".

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AIJAC's Jamie Hyams explains the Palestinian UN bid on Melbourne community television program "The Shtick"

As readers are hopefully aware, the big news out of Israel is the approval given overnight by the Israeli cabinet to a deal that will see long-captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit released by Hamas in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners. (The reported details of the deal have been summarised by AIJAC's own Sharyn Mittelman.) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statement on the Egyptian-German mediated agreement is here. AIJAC's statement on this news is here.

Speaking to ABC "Lateline" recently, Palestinian Authority (PA) official Nabil Shaath lamented that the Israelis have been "in full occupation of [his] country for years, 62 years." There is a subtle but profound message in that number. Going back 62 years, Israel existed in the territory set by a 1949 armistice agreement with the surrounding Arab countries, within the so-called "Green Line" that now delineates what is internationally recognised indisputably as Israeli sovereign territory.

Until June 1967, the West Bank was occupied and annexed by Jordan and Gaza was placed under military rule by Egypt. That Shaath considers Israel's existence in 1949 as an "occupation" speaks volumes about the true mindset of the PA - for all of the rhetoric about a return to the "pre-1967 borders", even mainstream PA figures consider Israel's existence, even within the 1948 borders, as illegitimate...

Today's Update looks at Syria, Iran and Turkey against the backdrop of the veto by China and Russia of sanctions by the UN Security Council against the Assad regime in Damascus for its ongoing violent crackdown against anti-government protesters. The resolution was supported by nine members but, significantly, Lebanon, which occupies a temporary seat on the Security Council, abstained from the vote, as did South Africa, India and Brazil. After the vote the EU indicated it intended passing its own sanctions against Syria. Meanwhile Turkey's PM Recep Erdogan continues to use the Syria issue and relentlessly attacks Israel for his own regional ambitions. We offer a number of articles that reveal the changing dynamics in the Middle East that are are not receiving sufficient attention in Australia and elsewhere.

The PLO ambassador to Brazil, Alzeben Ibrahim, has told a group of Brazilian university students that "Israel should disappear," according to a Portuguese-language media report.

AIJAC Senior Policy Analyst Jamie Hyams interviewed on ABC News24 (28/9/11) explains why Palestinian intransigence and not Israeli settlement building is the real reason peace talks have not resumed since 2008.

He also discusses why the announcement of approval for a proposed application to build 1,100 homes in the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo does not warrant international attention or condemnation.

On October 5, the Palestinians passed the first stage towards full membership at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), when the UNESCO board voted in favour of a Palestinian state being given UNESCO membership.

Forty of the 58 countries voted in favor, 14 abstained and the four countries that voted against were the US, Germany, Romania and Latvia.

The Palestinian application for UNESCO membership will now move to the General Conference, where UNESCO's 193 member states will vote on it. The next General Conference is scheduled from October 25 to November 10. A two-thirds majority of conference members is necessary for membership.

The Palestinian application to UNESCO has been highly criticised. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

"I ... would urge the governing body of UNESCO to think again before proceeding with that vote because the decision about status must be made in the United Nations and not in auxiliary groups that are subsidiary to the United Nations."

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Today's Update looks at last week's controversial approval for a proposed plan to build 1,100 homes within the boundaries of the Jewish suburb of Gilo in Jerusalem. Gilo lies just over the Green Line and is now home to 40,000 Israelis. As Commentary's Jonathan Tobin explains, Gilo is a symbol for many Israelis, having been a target for numerous terrorist sniper shootings during the Second Intifada and "was the laboratory where Palestinian terrorists sought to discover whether they could force Jews into abandoning their homes. They failed".

The latest news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has focused on the announcement of the planned construction of new homes in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Gilo, which is located over the 1967 Green line.

Meanwhile, on October 1, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal also made an announcement that is a serious blow to peace efforts, yet this announcement was barely reported by the media.

Meshal told an international conference in Iran called the ‘5th International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada', that: "Palestinians must resort to resistance no matter how costly it is, until Palestine is free and Israel is destroyed". Hamas' founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and a Palestinian state in all of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

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Today's Update focuses on the recent events at the UN. The Palestinians submitted their formal application for full membership of the UN, and both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly. The Palestinian application is here, the speech by Abbas is here and the speech by Netanyahu is here. Following the speeches, the Quartet of the UN, the European Union, Russia and the US released a proposal for the resumption of negotiations. Israel has decided to accept the proposal, but the Palestinians seem likely to reject it.

ABC TV Lateline's Ali Moore interviewed Palestinian Authority official Nabil Shaath last night about the PA's UN statehood bid. Shaath , an experienced statesman, gave what on the surface may be perceived as a compelling argument for supporting the statehood bid; however, further analysis reveals inherent problems in his argument.

A key point that Shaath was attempting to put across was the PLO's supposed recognition of Israel:

Up till this minute, Israel have not recognised the right of the Palestinians to a Palestinian state on the border of '67. We still recognise Israel as an Israeli state...

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On 23 September, when the Palestinians presented their application for full membership to the UN, the Middle East Quartet (consisting of the US, EU, Russia and the UN) announced a proposal to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to direct negotiations.

The Quartet statement urged the parties "to overcome the current obstacles and resume direct bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without delay or preconditions."

The operational paragraphs of the Quartet proposal included:

"1. Within a month there will be a preparatory meeting between the parties to agree an agenda and method of proceeding in the negotiation.
2. At that meeting there will be a commitment by both sides that the objective of any negotiation is to reach an agreement within a timeframe agreed to by the parties but not longer than the end of 2012. The Quartet expects the parties to come forward with comprehensive proposals within three months on territory and security, and to have made substantial progress within six months..."

Tony Blair, the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East, said that if the Israelis and Palestinians are serious about peace, they should respond positively to the initiative.

Israel did immediately respond positively to the Quartet's proposal, however, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas did not, responding instead negatively.

The Question Palestine is intricately linked with the United Nations via the resolutions adopted by its various organs and agencies and via the essential and lauded role of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - UNRWA - which embodies the international responsibility towards the plight of Palestine refugees, who are the victims of Al-Nakba (Catastrophe) that occurred in 1948. We aspire for and seek a greater and more effective role for the United Nations in working to achieve a just and comprehensive peace in our region that ensures the inalienable, legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people as defined by the resolutions of international legitimacy of the United Nations.

The AIR has previously canvassed numerous critical arguments concerning the Palestinian bid to have their "statehood" recognised at the UN. These include: that it avoids badly needed negotiations, violates the Oslo Accords, feeds Palestinian illusions about achieving their goals without compromise, courts violence, may damage the standing of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in its competition with Hamas, endangers Israeli-Palestinian cooperation on which the valuable Palestinian economic achievements of recent years rest, and risks the financial collapse of the already fiscally shaky PA government.

The unilateralist gambit by the Palestinian Authority (PA) to ram through a resolution on Palestinian statehood in the UN General Assembly will produce little more than the mirage of a fleeting diplomatic triumph.

No matter the hoopla surrounding it, the UN vote will certainly not represent a watershed moment for Palestinian statehood. Like a well-camouflaged detour leading nowhere, the diplomatic kabuki theatre may, in reality, do more harm than good for the cause of Palestine - a cause I have passionately supported since my formative years living in the Middle East.

The Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI, initiative was reportedly born in May 2005, when Abbas attended the summit of South American and Arab states in Brazil, where he met with President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva. Lula is said to have promised Abbas that, toward the completion of his second term ending January 1, 2011, he would rally support among Latin American states for the Palestinians to declare independence at the United Nations.

As expected, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application for Statehood to the UN Secretary General. The application can be downloaded HERE. In addition to this, both Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly and their two speeches (below) have provoked international uproar, especially in light of the speech one day earlier by US President Barack Obama. As The Australian reported, this was a different Obama from the one who spoke previously in the same forum.

That persistence has put the Palestinians on a collision course with the US and Israel. A frustrated Mr Obama told world leaders yesterday in his UN speech that "there are no shortcuts" to peace...

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US President Barack Obama's UN Speech yesterday was a milestone, in that it Included an unusually lucid explanation of Israel's strategic situation and its right to normal relations with its neighbours.

As readers are aware, the UN General Assembly session for 2011 has begun in New York amidst considerable drama of various sorts. While the media focus has mainly been on the status of the Palestinian bid to gain UN recognition as a state, there's a great deal more going on. This Update focuses on the various dramas occurring.

KEY ISSUES

It will not establish a Palestinian state under international law

• It is expected that the UN resolution will be blocked in the Security Council by US veto, and will pass in the General Assembly where it is non-binding.  The General Assembly cannot by itself establish or recognise a state, it can only admit new members after being nominated by the Security Council.
• The General Assembly has already recommended the creation of a Palestinian State previously and the resolutions have not created a Palestinian state.
• the Palestinians do not meet the traditional test for statehood – particularly the test of effective government – premature and unilateral recognition of an “unripe” Palestinian state could have a prejudicial effect on other regional conflicts. 
• While it is arguable that the West Bank, or Gaza could meet requirements for statehood, the resolution being sought does not meet requirements for statehood as it seeks recognition of a united and independent Palestinian state on Gaza, West Bank and east Jerusalem.

As the day of reckoning for the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN, now reportedly slated for Friday, draws ever closer, there is a frantic last-minute effort to avert the potentially disastrous showdown in favour of peace talks. Such talks are widely recognised as the only possible way to reach a genuine and lasting solution to the decades-old conflict. For example, Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair said yesterday that:

"What we will be looking for over the next few days is a way of putting together something that allows their claims and legitimate aspirations for statehood to be recognized whilst actually renewing the only thing that's going to produce a state, which is a negotiation directly between the two sides...

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AIJAC readers may be interested to read an interesting Q&A featured by the Guardian on the Palestinian bid to seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

Answering readers questions on this topic are Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli journalist and writer who is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

It interesting to note that Ibish is not enthusiastic about the Palestinian UN bid as he is concerned that it may result in economic turmoil for the Palestinians with the US threatening to cutoff of US aid

In addition, Klein makes a critical point regarding Israeli security and how the establishment of a Palestinian can be both an existential necessity and an existential threat.

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If a Palestinian state is not primarily for the benefit of the supposedly long-suffering Palestinian refugees, then what is the point of it? Nothing highlights the urgency of this question more clearly than the admission by a senior Palestinian diplomat that Palestinian refugees will not automatically become citizens of a new Palestinian state.

With September 20 the Palestinian Authority's proposed date to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state - also known as the "unilateral declaration of independence" (UDI) - we present selected quotes and links to a series of articles that explain everything a person might reasonably need to know about the issue.

According to a report by Oren Dorell in USA Today, the Palestinian emissary to the US has told a press conference that no Jews would be permitted to live in the planned Palestinian state.

"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor.

The territory to which Areikat refers would include places like the ancient city of Hebron. As Jeffrey Goldberg notes, Hebron is not just any city, but is the second holiest site in the Jewish faith...

There is no question that Israel's strategic environment at the moment is looking grimmer than it has in a while. Its long-standing good relations, at times something close to an alliance, with Turkey appear to be history. Meanwhile, following the Cairo embassy attack last Friday, it became clearer than ever that the cold peace that has prevailed between Israel and Egypt for more than 30 years - a core component of Israel's security planning - is at serious risk...

There is a tendency to assume among many editorialists and pundits that this deterioration must have occurred because Israel has supposedly been intransigent, particularly in terms of offering insufficient concessions to the Palestinians.

Noted American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out that this automatic, conventional analysis actually has it backwards.

With the approaching Palestinian unilateral bid for statehood during the UN session which started this week, diplomats in New York revealed to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that pro-Palestinian pressure is a major factor underlying their countries' decision-making on whether to support or oppose the vote. According to the diplomats quoted by the newspaper, votes on the matter are largely based on countries' attempts to prevent retaliation against them from regional groups sympathetic or loyal to the Palestinian cause. Moreover, Australia was specifically mentioned in the article as a particular target for such efforts.

The influence of public opinion polls is having a significant impact on the politics of the Middle East, given that the ‘Arab Spring' has taught us that the will of the people can be stronger than the will of its leadership.

Further, one of the accusations often hurled at Israel by its most vehement critics is that it is supposedly intent on "Judaising" Jerusalem, supposedly forcibly evicting Arab residents from their homes or driving them out of the city. So what do the city's 300,000 Arab residents say about their situation?

The Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs has conducted a rigorous survey of east Jerusalem Arabs to find out their views. In east Jerusalem the total sample was 1,039, and it covered the entire city, every neighborhood and was based on face-to-face interviews. The sample was representative of the overall Palestinian population of the city by age, education, gender, occupation, neighborhood, and income.

Interestingly, the survey found that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem would prefer to become citizens of Israel than be citizens of a new Palestinian state. Moreover, 40 percent said they would probably or definitely move in order to live under Israeli rather than Palestinian rule.

The Canberra Times today published this letter which I wrote in response to a particularly ill-informed piece by former Australian Ambassador Peter Rodgers arguing for an Australian ‘yes" vote on the Palestinian bid to have the existence of a Palestinian state unilaterally recognised at the UN...

I think the letter does a reasonable job of answering his main argument, which is based on the historically absurd assumption that Israel is refusing to recognise Palestinian aspirations for statehood. But I did want to say a little more about the point I make in the second paragraph about the supposed Zionist slogan quoted by Rodgers "A land without people for a people without a land."

The European Union (EU) is divided on how they will vote on the upcoming UN resolution to recognise an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

This weekend, European foreign ministers are set to meet in Poland (the current president of the EU) in a final effort to find a unanimous position on the Palestinian UN resolution. However, it is clear that there are stark differences between the 27 members of the EU.

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It has s become increasingly clear in recent months that the Palestinian Unity deal signed by Hamas and Fatah in May is not leading to a lot of unity...

The extent of the ongoing differences between Fatah and Hamas was starkly highlighted in a recent dispatch from Reuters. Apparently, Fatah and Hamas cannot even agree on the time of day - literally.

The release of the United Nation's 'Palmer Report' into last year's flotilla incident aboard the Mavi Marmara has vindicated Israel by finding that its naval blockade of the Gaza strip is legal under international law. Moreover, Israel has the right to enforce that blockade - including in international waters. It has also rebutted many of the false claims and assumptions that have been made about the flotilla incident and about the broader situation in Gaza.

The UN investigative committee headed by former prime minister of New Zealand Sir Geoffrey Palmer, an expert on maritime law, was established by the UN to examine the Israeli raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010.

Over the weekend, the UN's Palmer Report into the Mavi Marmara maritime incident last May was published - the full report is available to read here, a good summary of its key provisions is here.  That report - which takes Israel's side on most questions relating to the Gaza blockade and the background to the incident - has led to an intensification of the crisis in Israeli Turkish relations - with Turkey expelling the Israeli Ambassador and threatening to cut off trade relations.  The response of the Israeli Government to the report - it was accepted with some reservations - is here.

As reported by Al Jazeera, the US has begun a serious attempt to prevent the Palestinian unilateral statehood bid at the UN later this month. The Palestinian Authority, however, has remained steadfast and continued its refusal to back down.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the US has launched an attempt to persuade the Palestinians not to seek statehood at the annual UN General Assembly meeting beginning on September 20.

"When it comes to going to the United Nations, I think the train has left the station," Muhammad Shtayyeh, a member of Fatah's central committee who is overseeing the UN bid, said on Sunday...

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The phenomenon of ‘Temple Denial' is a campaign led by Palestinian political leaders, religious figures, academics and journalists to delegitimise the Jewish historical connection with the area of Temple Mount and Western Wall in Jerusalem - which according to Jewish tradition is Judaism's most holy sites.

It also attempts to increase the importance of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and even the Western Wall in Islam as part of the effort to make Jerusalem a Muslim city under Arab governance - and to deny the need for any Palestinian compromise on Jerusalem with Jewish religious and national rights. This trend even includes the removal of archaeological material from the Temple Mount without archaeological supervision (see blog post by Allon Lee).

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Australia should vote against any United Nations resolution that attempts to replace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians as the only route to Palestinian statehood.

If a "Yes" vote produced a Palestinian state that resolved all the issues of borders, refugees, settlements, and Jerusalem, Israel would be the first to support it.

Unfortunately, as it stands, the resolution the Palestinians are seeking absolutely will not help end the conflict and will almost certainly exacerbate it.

Clearly piqued by the incessant anti-Israel bigotry, Dr. Denis MacEoin, a former lecturer in Islamic studies, has come out in a passionate defence of the Jewish state in a letter to the Edinburgh University Student's Association committee and separately to the leader of the British Greens party over their support for BDS.

First up, MacEoin, who is not Jewish, expressed his outrage that his alma mater had passed a motion to boycott Israeli goods, services and people on the grounds that Israel is an apartheid regime.

He makes the case that Israel is not a perfect state but to compare it to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa is not true "even as a metaphor".

Haaretz has reported on a new bill being introduced into US Congress which would see US funding for the UN substantially reduced if the Palestinian UN statehood bid wins the upcoming vote.

A republican congresswoman introduced a bill on Tuesday, along with 57 co-sponsors, asking Congress to block U.S. funds for any United Nations entity that supports giving Palestine an elevated status at the UN.

The head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is also seeking to ban U.S. contributions to the UN Human Rights Council and an anti-racism conference seen as a platform for anti-Israel rhetoric...

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In a hard-hitting analysis that raises some important reasons why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has not been resolved, columnist David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen notes:

The Palestinians, so far as they are a people, have now a long history of being able to do things without consequences.

He compares this with how the world treats Israeli actions that are demonstrably undertaken in the cause of self-defence...

Rockets continue to be fired at Israel from Gaza, despite yet another ceasefire being called...

AIJAC recommends a new twitter feed - QassamCount - which provides realtime info on all of the rocket attacks, including where they hit and any damage done.

Most commentators seem to think that Gaza's Hamas rulers want a ceasefire and they certainly keep calling them... So why do rockets keep falling?

AIJAC guest Professor Efraim Inbar from Bar-Ilan University is in today's Australian on the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations.

He notes:

Unfortunately, General Assembly resolutions cannot fix a Palestinian national movement that is hopelessly fractured and dysfunctional.

The UN cannot turn the Palestinian factions into one political entity. Can the UN bring Gaza and the West Bank together to present reasonable interlocutors for Israeli negotiators? Can it mellow Hamas's lust to kill Jews and to eradicate Israel? Can it eradicate the "shaheed" death culture?

Is the UN in a position to infuse pragmatism into Palestinian political culture?

Israel's respected Middle East Analyst Ehud Yaari speaks to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Weisenthal Centre on the main reason behind Iran's Gaza Missile Gambit; Why Hezbollah is quiet (so far); Post-Tahrir Sq trouble in Cairo, as over 100 groups urge government to sever ties with Israel; Iron Dome's surprising and promising results...

The terrorist attack in southern Israel on August 18 in which eight Israelis were killed - six civilians and two from the security forces - was initiated and executed by the Palestinian terrorist organisation known as the "Popular Resistance Committees", which operate as a terrorist arm of Hamas. The operation represents a change in the approach of Hamas toward the issue of the "Arab Spring", from acting only passively as an observer, limiting itself to damage control, to an entirely new stance in an attempt to reshape reality in the Middle East.

Early Monday morning eight people were injured in south Tel Aviv, when a 20 year old from Nablus in the West Bank, hijacked a taxi and rammed it into a police road block protecting a Tel Aviv nightclub.  He then exited the vehicle and stabbed additional people screaming "Allah Akbar" [god is great]. The suspect was tackled to the ground by Border Police officers and taken into custody.

Tel Aviv District Commander Aharon Eksol said the attack was "definitely an act of terror". Israel Radio reported that the attack was coordinated to target a large youth party being held in the nightclub.

From the Hebrew-language Israeli press comes this rare good news story, showing that the relations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians is more complex that it often appears from the daily news-reports, which focuses on violence and confrontation.

This Update deals with some new writing exploring the problems and pitfalls associated with the Palestinian intention to unilaterally seek UN recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state - sometimes termed a "Unilateral Declaratation of Independence" or UDI - next month.

We lead with a short primer on the whole issue compiled by Uriel Heilman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Heilman has a useful summary of the various legal rules relevant to the effort, including what the UN General Assembly can and cannot do for the Palestinians. He also has a brief but helpful examination of the many uncertainties that will follow the UN effort and the various ways it could lead to violence or make peace more difficult.

This week the Palestinian Authority (PA) cancelled local government elections for the fourth time. This lack of democracy is a clear sign that the Palestinians are not ready for statehood.

Elections were scheduled for January 2009 but did not occur, then they were supposed to be held in July 2010, but were cancelled by the PA "for the sake of public interest." In February, elections were scheduled for July 2011 and then were cancelled "until better conditions are available" and rescheduled for October 22. This week PA President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree postponing them again - "indefinitely".

Sari Nusseibeh's "A Jewish rethink" (AFR, 19 August) is gravely disappointing from someone regarded as a pragmatic Palestinian moderate genuinely interested in peaceful co-existence with Israel.

It is understandable that he endorses J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami's call for the US to impose a solution, although he fails to mention that the proposal he sets out - a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with land swaps and a shared capital in Jerusalem - has three times been offered or accepted by Israel and on each occasion rejected by the Palestinians...

According to a potentially very significant news story, Hamas and its long-time key patron, Iran, have had a falling out over the unrest in Syria...

While it is much too early to predict that the Hamas-Iran split will be permanent, if this did happen, it would be a major re-alignment of the Middle Eastern map, with important implications...

THE Palestinian Authority's plan to unilaterally seek United Nations recognition of nominal statehood cannot lead to anything good for either Palestinians or Israelis.

It is unlikely to result in significant progress towards a genuine Palestinian state, and could produce several highly negative consequences.

From the Epic Revisionist Handbook 2011, comes the kind of story that the West and pro-Palestinian apologists prefer to gloss over, a documentary on official Palestinian Authority TV reveals a bright glorious future.... without Jewish people in Jerusalem.

Broadcast on August 10, the documentary apparently labels Jewish worship as "sin and filth" and that "Jews will disappear from the picture". The show conjures up a nightmarish future, promising that the Western Wall Plaza - the most holy place for prayer in the world for Jews - will disappear and be replaced by an Arab residential suburb.

As readers are probably aware, there was a major terror attack in southern Israel yesterday, the most serious in a number of years, in which 8 Israelis were killed by a group of terrorists who apparently crossed from Gaza into Sinai, and then into Israel (a useful timeline on the attack is here). Israel responded with airstrikes in Gaza that reportedly killed the leader of the group believed responsible, together with five other terrorists.

The attack raises questions about diminished Egyptian control of Sinai, as well as the growth of extreme Salafist Islamist groups in both the Sinai and Gaza. As Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak stated: " The incident reflects the weakness of Egypt’s hold over Sinai and the spread of terrorist elements."

Israel has been accused of many deeds over the years. Removed from their context, the below paragraphs from a report in The Guardian could almost sound like an exaggerated report on an Israeli military operation in the 2008/09 Gaza conflict - the kind that would be released by Palestinian state-controlled media outlets.

UNRWA, the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, said the camp's residents fled after [the city] came under fire from gunboats and ground troops over the weekend. It was not immediately clear where the refugees were seeking shelter.

... The Local Coordination Committees, an activist group that helps organize protests... also confirmed troops fired at fleeing families. It said random gunfire erupted Monday in addition to a campaign of raids and house-to-house arrests...

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An Egyptian religious TV channel has broadcast a mock trial of former leader Hosni Mubarak, who appears as a puppet, and is accused by child prosecutors, of being, essentially, a puppet of Israel.

The clip on al Hekma TV, includes a number of anti-Israel slurs that feed into the recurring motif of Israel and Jews as spoilers and poisoners of Egyptian society.

Contradicting local boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) supporters who claimed their actions in preventing customers entering a Max Brenner chocolate store in Melbourne last month were peaceful, a prominent supporter of the campaign has condemned their behaviour as "indefensible" and "pretty stupid".

In an interview with the Australian, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Reverend Jim Barr, warned that heavy-handed tactics which resulted in 19 activists being arrested had backfired.

If called upon to march on Israel's borders from the West Bank in the event a Palestinian state is unilaterally established on the 1967 borders come September; are Palestinians going to spoil their leaders' party by not providing the numbers?

But what do you do if you hold a rally and the main beneficiaries of the event won't show?

Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is worried because his own people are currently disinterested in attending anti-settlement protests.

Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if the Palestinian campaign to have the UN declare its support for a state on the 1967 borders on September 20 will spill over into the "Third Durban Conference" which starts two days later?

In other words, will Durban III, being held to mark the 10th anniversary of the first, descend into the abject anti-Israel and antisemitic hate fest that marred the original and overshadowed the second?

And will the debate about UN recognition of Palestinian statehood be used to stoke the fires?

This blog has been following events in Egypt over the past few weeks, as the Islamist groups seem to have been becoming far more assertive, resulting in increased weapons smuggling to Hamas in Gaza and, potentially, a cosier relationship between Egypt and Iran.

The Sinai Peninsula, inhabited mostly by various Bedouin tribes, sits between the Egyptian heartland and the Israeli border, and has long been an area which the central Egyptian government has struggled to fully control. Smuggling from Sinai into Gaza has been a constant source of Israeli-Egyptian disagreement over recent years, with Israel urging Egypt to make greater efforts to prevent this, and Egyptian efforts in this regard fluctuating.

Unfortunately, as Alex Joffe has observed in Jewish Ideas Daily, recent events in Sinai following the Egyptian  have been far from encouraging...

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Anyone naïve enough to divine any signs of Hamas moderation in its quest for Israel's elimination or that it will play nice for the Palestinian Authority's September UN statehood bid, needs the services of a top ophthalmologist (although preferably not Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad, who is a little busy at the moment anyhow).

According to an August 4 briefing paper from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, Hamas' top echelon repeated in different forums their opposition to Israel's existence or compromise in late July.

There are reports that the Palestinian leadership is again sending out mixed signals about how determined they are to press ahead with controversial plans to seek to have a Palestinian state recognised by the UN next month.

This Update features some additional pieces on those Palestinian plans - with a special focus on analysis of the possible meaning and implications of those plans for Palestinian society.

On August 9, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) published an editorial "Fence-sitting, but the wisest course", which advocated that Australia abstain on the UN General Assembly resolution that is expected to seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

The editorial was commenting on news that Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd held different positions on the Palestinian UN bid. According to the Age's Daniel Flitton, Rudd wrote to the Prime Minister suggesting that Australia abstain on the Palestinian UN resolution, while Gillard has declared strong support for Israel. The SMH editorial declared, "we believe Rudd's advice is the sound course".

Abstaining on the resolution is not a "sound course" but rather a counter-productive course. Australia should not merely abstain but should vote against the resolution in the interests of Middle East peace and a two-state solution. Unilateral acts by the Palestinians will not achieve either peace or statehood, but are likely to escalate the conflict.

There is a tendency in the West to treat Palestinian society as if it were a full-blown democracy - after all, they appear to have elections, and Prime Ministers and Presidents and parliament and all the trappings.(This is despite the fact that election scheduled for two years ago still have not occurred and it remains unclear if and when they ever will.)

It is therefore worth pointing out that in many respects, the civil and political liberties that are the hallmark of genuine democracy are at best contingent and partial in the Palestinian Authority (PA) - to say nothing about Hamas-controlled Gaza.

For instance, media freedom is pretty limited in the Palestinian Authority, as a recent case reveals. Noted Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes about the plight of award-winning Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassouneh, who is in hiding after apparently upsetting local authorities by her reporting about a sit-in strike.

This blog post looks at the Palestinian UN bid and considers analysis from:

Veteran Washington insider Steven Rosen who writes that the current proposal for UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state does not meet the legal requirements for statehood.

Efarim Karsh and Asaf Romirowsky who have written an article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the UN should not support the Palestinian UN bid, because it threatens to create a precedent of "land for war" rather than "land for peace".

Benedict Brogan, Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph who writes that Netanyahu's gesture to negotiate a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with land swaps demands a "swift and positive response from David Cameron and William Hague".

The Palestinian Authority's (PA) bid to unilaterally seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines in September appears to be losing momentum - not least among Palestnians...

The PA's plan to seek UN recognition of nominal statehood cannot lead to anything good for either Palestinians or Israelis, as even many Palestinians are now acknowledging. The US will likely veto any resolution on statehood in the Security Council, which alone has authority to grant UN entry, so the Palestinians will have to instead go directly to the UN General Assembly and seek recognition as a non-member observer state.

The unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, and its international recognition, would be a huge mistake.

A peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians is essential, but can be achieved only through honest negotiations - not by one party imposing a unilateral decision.

Over the past two years, the Palestinian Authority has refused to sit at the negotiating table with the Israeli government, hiding behind the excuse of construction work on a few West Bank settlements. At the same time, it has been negotiating the creation of a national unity government with Hamas - a terrorist group whose stated aim is the elimination of Israel. A Palestinian "government" of a unilaterally established, self-declared "Palestinian state" in which Hamas is a member will make negotiations, to say nothing of a peace agreement, impossible.

For the most part, the international community is tired of the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the prospect of the United Nations "ending" it in September by recognising Palestinian statehood is appealing to many. Moreover, many in the international community consider a solution based on the 1967 borders to be fair.

Not far from Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, the storied birthplace of Jesus Christ and the West Bank's most popular tourist site, there lies a landmark of a very different kind. Sitting horizontally on a gate in front of the al-Ayda Refugee Camp is a 10-metre long iron key, weighing nearly two tons. The seemingly innocuous monument actually represents the most controversial demand made by pro-Palestinian advocates: That Israel must permit up to 5 million Palestinians to immigrate across its borders, effectively ending any chance it will endure another generation as a homeland for the Jewish people.

This Update features some more comment on the pitfalls of the problematic Palestinian strategy of seeking unilateral recognition of statehood at the UN.

First up is the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, who argues that this policy is additional blunder by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. He points out that reconciliation with Hamas, part of the strategy to present a unified Palestinian front, has gone nowhere, Palestinians are increasingly questioning what a UN vote can accomplish, and economically, the PA is in deep trouble. He even raises the possibility that Abbas may be seeking to provoke Palestinians to take to the streets in a third Intifada.

The Palestinian UN bid to seek recognition of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines has been criticised by many commentators, including Hamas officials.

Haaretz reported that Mahmoud al-Zahar, a prominent Hamas member in Gaza called the Palestinian UN bid "just nonsense" and a "political scam".

The Palestinian Authority (PA) "is broke", and according to a recent New York Times article, "the immediate cause of the crisis is the failure of foreign - especially Arab - donors to fulfill promises of aid." According to AP, Arab donations have decreased dramatically over the past couple years, as "in 2009, the Arab countries gave $462 million, a contribution that dropped to $287 million in 2010 and $78.5 million this year."

The predicament has led even the usually optimistic PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to declare that "this is, without doubt, the worst financial crisis the Palestinian Authority has ever faced", noting that there could not be a worse time for this, with the PA's planned unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) coming up at the United Nations in September.

More than 150,000 state employees, whose salaries support a million people, had their wages cut in half this month. Palestinian banks have lent the government more than $1 billion and do not want to lend more. Some ministries have temporarily lost electricity because they have not paid their bills. Last week, the government ordered a reduction in the price of bread, leading to bakery strikes. Garbage is piling up.

The United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) - set up in 1949 to look after the humanitarian needs of Palestinians - has long been the subject of controversy, with critics accusing it of deliberately perpetuating the refugee problem....

Now Israeli researcher Arlene Kushner has written, in the latest edition of Middle East Quarterly, a detailed compendium and deconstruction of many recent examples illustrating, in her words "The propensity for senior UNRWA staff to make inappropriate, incendiary, and highly politicized statements - in stark contrast to the organization's mandate."...

A new article at the Jerusalem Post offers an interesting example of what might be done if UNRWA's insistence that Palestinian refugees must never be resettled, but must stay in refugee camps until the conflict is over, could be bypassed.

MEMRI has translated an interview with Nabil Shaath, Head of Foreign Relations in Fatah - the dominant party within the Palestinian Authority - which certainly provides cause for concern. Shaath essentially confesses that the PA's commitment to a two-state solution is merely part of a larger plan to eventually end Israel's existence as a Jewish homeland.

[The French initiative] reshaped the issue of the "Jewish state" into a formula that is also unacceptable to us - two states for two peoples. They can describe Israel itself as a state for two peoples, but we will be a state for one people. The story of "two states for two peoples" means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this...

It appears that for the first time, neither Arabs nor Israelis trust the President of the United States to advocate their interests. A recent poll by the Arab American Institute has recorded a significant decline in support for Obama's Middle East policies. In all six of the Arab countries surveyed, Obama's ratings were at 10% or less, making Obama's policies less popular than those of George W. Bush or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, largely due to disappointment Obama has failed to keep the promises of his 2009 Cairo Speech in the context of the Arab Spring. In addition, majorities in all six countries surveyed said "Obama's handing of the Palestinian issue had worsened US-Arab relations", and many consider him to be too pro-Israel. Conversely, a May 2011 poll showed only 12% of Israeli Jews believe that President Obama is pro-Israel, while 40% labeled him pro-Palestinian, as many Israelis have grown more suspicious of the American leader.

The fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February led to a sharp increase in weapons smuggling to the Gaza Strip and continues today, according to a recent piece by Israeli security correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai. In the past six months alone, Bedouin smugglers have transferred three times the quantity of industrial explosives to Gaza as they did in all of 2010, as Gaza's terrorist organisations roughly doubled their number of rockets to an estimate 10,000, an amount equivalent to Hezbollah's arsenal at the start of the 2006 War.

The Palestinian plan to seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines may be losing momentum, according to numerous media reports.

It would appear that the photo used online to illustrate pro-Palestinian activist Randa Abdel-Fattah's latest anti-Israel screed features a recycled picture from 2010 that has been discredited as a piece of confected theatre.

This Update features a couple of pieces on the apparent continued prevalence amongst Palestinians of the goal of eliminating the State of Israel, as well as an important comment on the problems created by the overwhelming importance of aid to the Palestinian economy.

A new video from the Israeli Foreign Ministry does a good job of explaining, in a very brief and easy to understand way, some basic facts about the history and legal status of the West Bank.

On Wednesday, the Sydney Morning Herald featured a rant by Australian-born-Egyptian-Muslim-Palestinian pro-Palestinian activist Randa Abdel-Fattah arguing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the latters' ongoing suffering stems from Israel supposedly seeking to safeguard the ''purity'' of a Jewish-only state.

The ostensible motivation for her article was a desire to share the numerous experiences of racism she claims to have witnessed when visiting Israel and the West Bank in May. Yet nowhere in the article is she able to recount a single example of the alleged racism because her real motive is to justify her support for a one-state solution.

The situation in Syria took an even graver turn yesterday. As the ruling Assad regime continues to brutalise dissenting citizens, some Syrians appear to be lashing out at the regime's minority Alawite sect. In retaliation, several Allawites went on a rampage of their own. Nada Bakri reports in The New York Times:

On Sunday, residents of Homs, Syria's second-largest city, discovered the bodies of three Alawites mutilated and dumped in a deserted area, according to Omar Idlibi of the Local Coordination Committees, a group that helps organize and document protests. All three were armed government loyalists, he said...

In another example of antisemitism sponsored by the Palestinian Authority (PA), this week the PA rebroadcast an antisemitic cartoon from a Jordanian newspaper regarding the division of Sudan on official PA television.

The cartoon had the headline "Division of Sudan," and it showed the distorted images of an American and a Jew toasting the division over barrels of Sudanese oil.

Amid the cheers over the birth of the new nation state of the Republic of South Sudan, some commentators are noting the largely overlooked significance of what has just occurred, not least for an Israeli-Palestinian peace process eventually leading to a two state solution.

Compared with South Sudan, Palestine is the French Riviera. This raises serious questions about the moral justification for the Palestinians to take extreme stands that make compromise so difficult, while they continue to act as a bottomless drain on the ultimately limited resources the developed world can provide in aid.

Israeli civil rights organisation director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has written a good primer in the Jerusalem Post on why the blockade of Gaza is legal and how flotilla activists are likely breaking US law.

Pursuant to the Oslo Accords ... the Palestinians agreed that the Gaza coastline would be placed under Israeli control and that no foreign ships would be allowed closer than 12 nautical miles from the shore.

Israel demanded this out of concern over widespread import of conventional and unconventional weapons into Gaza.

Noted Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has written an article entitled "Palestinians cannot accept less than 100%" (published on the webiste of the Hudson Institue on July 12) which does a good job of explaining why the Palestinian Authority prefers the symbolic gesture of seeking UN recognition to renewing negotiations with Israel.

He argues that both radical Palestinians such as Hamas, and less radical ‘moderate' Palestinians such as the PLO, are unwilling to accept less than 100% of their demands. Most importantly, Toameh argues that even if Israel accepted all of their demands neither camp would commit to ending the conflict.

Sometimes, a news item comes along that seems far too convenient to actually be true. For a Middle East commentator, it's very rare to have clear-cut proof of something that you have been saying all-along. Today, however, is one of those occasions.

As noted in this post, the organisers of the (now mostly defunct) flotilla have worrying links to Hamas in Gaza. While there is undoubtedly suffering in Gaza, much of this can be attributed to its Hamas regime, which maintains control through torturing and murdering dissenters and censoring the press, while forcing Gazans to live in a perpetual state of war by refusing to negotiate with Israel or even recognise Israel's existence and renounce violence. It was, therefore, a no-brainer to point-out the hypocrisy of a group trying to make a political statement against Israel while cavorting with a far less savoury regime and ignoring much greater suffering elsewhere.

As a result many commentators - from Australian comedian Sandy Gutman to yours truly - have called for the flotilla activists to prove their self-proclaimed "humanitarian" intentions by going to Syria...

Writing in Foreign Policy, Rachel Shabi has interviewed a number of Palestinian activists and, unbeknownst to her, unearthed some startling and oft-overlooked views. Shabi found the activists to be disillusioned with the current Palestinian leadership and the direction in which they are headed - particularly on the upcoming UN statehood bid which, as they point out, is purely symbolic and will achieve few practical outcomes.

"September is a moment of truth for us," says Diana Alzeer, a 23-year-old social activist from Ramallah who cites the revolution in Egypt as inspiration. "We see that a dictatorship of over 30 years was gone in two weeks. So why not for Palestinians?"

On Monday, ABC Radio's The Spirit of Things  broadcast a fascinating interview with Sharon Rosen and Suheir Rasul from the Jerusalem offices of a peace initiative called Search for Common Ground. 

Sharon Rosen: Search for Common Ground is an international conflict transformation organisation that was founded 29 years ago by an American; his name is John Marks. It has now developed into the largest conflict transformation organisation in the world, with 37 offices in 25 countries. And the Middle East program, which was basically focussing on Palestinian-Israeli relations, began in 1990 and the actual office in situ on the ground in Jerusalem was opened in the year 2000. I became the acting director of the Jerusalem office in 2008 and Suheir joined me as co-director in 2009.

The prominent Friends of Israel Initiative formed under the leadership of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in 2010, has argued that a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state and international recognition of it would be a "huge mistake".

In an article published by the Jerusalem Post, the Friends of Israel Initiative (FII) argue that a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state is dangerous having "unforeseeable consequences" and maintain that peace can only be achieved though bilateral negotiations.

AIJAC's latest email Update looks at why and how the 2011 Gaza flotilla gambit fizzled out. In contrast to 2010's headline-grabbing political stunt that acted as a Trojan Horse for the Turkish Islamist IHH charity resulting in needless deaths and injuries, this was no replay.

The Middle East Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia) concluded a high-level meeting yesterday, aimed at re-starting Israeli/Palestinian peace talks, without agreeing on a concluding statement. As Barak Ravid reported for Haaretz, the disagreement was over whether or not the Quartet could demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish State.

"The goal was to give each side something that was important to them," a Western diplomat said. "The Palestinians were supposed to get 1967 borders with land swaps and the Israelis wanted to receive in return the recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland, but...

While the border between Gaza and Israel has been relatively calm since mid-April, the latest rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza suggest that violence in that area may again escalate.

The Jerusalem Post reported that on Wednesday morning a Kassam rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded in a field near a kibbutz in the Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council. On Tuesday evening, two Kassam rockets were fired from Gaza, exploding in Sdot Negev Regional Council. One of the rockets lightly damaged a home, exploding just a few metres away from it, while the other landed in open space. Late last week, an IDF soldier was lightly wounded by an explosive device that was detonated near his vehicle along the Gaza border fence.

Hannah Rosenthal, the US State Department's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat anti-Semitism, has just completed a visit to Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in a bid to reduce the antisemitic content of their education syllabuses. As she told JTA, the State Department has found the textbooks produced in these countries to be replete with extremely offensive material regarding Jews, as well as Christians and women. The antisemitic subject matter included references to Jews as the "spawn of monkeys and pigs", as well as material from The Protocols of The Elders of Zion...

Moammar Mashni of Australians for Palestine had a letter in the Australian Financial Review about the Gaza flotilla. Here's AIJAC's response in today's edition.

As we reported last week, the fragile Palestinian unity agreement has been looking like ending before it even begins. Fatah and Hamas have not been able to come to an agreement on an interim government and, as it stands, the upcoming UN bid seems to be the only point of agreement remaining between the two factions.

Meanwhile, a crisis seems to have hit the Palestinian Authority due to an inability to secure funding that had been pledged to the PA leadership....

Ray Hanania, a former head of the Palestinian American Congress and recent member of the national board of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, has recently written about the discrimination that he has suffered throughout his involvement in Arab public affairs...

As AIJAC has been reporting, the planned flotilla to Gaza has been facing a number of obstacles in recent weeks. In the wake of the Greek decision over the weekend to prevent any vessels planning on sailing to Gaza from leaving Greek ports, the flotilla organisers appear to be looking to shift tack, dropping all pretences that they may have had of bringing any humanitarian aid to Gaza.

While it will not revoke the order preventing the ships from leaving, the Greek Government has offered to transfer all humanitarian aid that was on board the flotilla to Gaza through other means; this offer was accepted by the Israeli Government but the flotilla organisers rejected it outright, opting instead to try and pressure the Greek Government into reversing its policy. Similarly, Israeli authorities offered last year to...

Following up on Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz’s post yesterday - now that Turkish authorities have found baseless widely-reported claims by leaders of the Gaza flotilla that an Irish boat was sabotaged by Israel in a Turkish port, it is worth noting that the Australian media has, to date, largely failed to report this (one exception was The Australian today.).

In terms of journalistic ethics, this is particularly problematic with respect to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Following up on the previous post on Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), it seems that it is not only concern for Western governments - the radical Islamic fundamentalist group is also troubling the Palestinian Authority.

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces in the West Bank on July 2 detained dozens of HT supporters.

It is often pointed out that there are shortages of medicines and medical supplies in Gaza, implying that this is the result of Israel's blockade. But while there are such shortages, they actually have almost nothing to do with either Israel or the blockade. Rather, they are primarily the result of an internal Hamas-Fatah dispute.

In a move against Palestinian unilateralism, the United States Senate passed a resolution yesterday that threatens to withdraw aid from the Palestinian Authority if they continue with their commitment to go to the UN and request statehood in September. The resolution also rejected any Palestinian government that would include Hamas, until the group, which is a designated terrorist organisation in the US, renounces violence and recognises Israel. JTA reports:

Led by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), the resolution had 88 co-sponsors.

In an unexpected setback to President Abbas, the UAE-based al-Bayan newspaper has reported, that Jordan will oppose the Palestinian Authority's bid for unilateral statehood at the United Nations, becoming the first Arab state to publicly rebuff President Abbas.

A senior official from the Hashemite kingdom said that Amman will vote against a Palestinian statehood bid at the UN, because if it succeeds:

"Jordan's top national interests will be in danger...

Following up on Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz’s earlier post which noted that Fatah and Hamas have reportedly abandoned efforts to form a unity government until September, it important to point out that such discord was more or less predicted by most knowledgeable experts...

Moreover, as Y. Yehoshua of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) recently pointed out in an important paper on the Fatah-Hamas deal, most of the details of agreement have never been made public, and remain completely unclear...

Jordanian opposition to the UN Resolution on Palestinian statehood, as discussed in Arsen Ostrovsky's blog post earlier today, comes after a number of recent articles noting mixed feelings within the Arab world about the upcoming UN vote.

One is a two-part piece in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot by their Arab Affairs report Roee Nahmias about the Arab states' inability to intervene constructively, as well as the mixed feelings of both Arab leaders and publics. Another is a report on how Arab media are covering the declaration by Israeli Arab journalist Linda Menuhin Abdul Aziz, in a paper she did for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs.

This Update features two pieces which describe the reality of the situation in Gaza - in contrast to the way it is often described by activists and even in general media reports.

First up is recent visitor to Australia Dr. Michael Rubin, who compares Gaza to a whole variety of countries around the world on a whole variety of statistical measures - and finds Gaza better off than a very large percentage of them. For instance, Gazans have a life expectancy both higher than the global average, and higher than in dozens of countries, many far from the poorest in the world. The same applies to infant mortality, while Gazans are also far from comparatively very badly off in terms of unemployment - and they actually outstrip many countries in terms of cell phone and internet use.

There has been a great deal written and said about the second flotilla of activists supposed to be departing for Gaza very shortly in defiance of Israel's naval blockade.

However, an internal document from flotilla organisers published by an Israeli newspaper suggests the whole event may be something of a fizzer. According to the document, the flotilla is expected in the end to carry fewer than 300 passengers - possibly much fewer...

Jerusalem has always been used as a pretext for conspiracy theories and propaganda campaigns against Israel in the Arab world. A perennial claim throughout the Arab-Israel conflict is that something Israel is doing presages the destruction of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

One of the key questions that always comes up in debates on the Middle East are the details of what happened during the 1948 war. Among Palestinians and their advocates, the whole war is generally presented as a Zionist plot to steal the land and expel its indigenous inhabitants - which was understandably resisted by both Palestinian militias and the armies of neighbouring Arab states. This is the Palestinian "narrative" and more or less what is meant by the common use of the word Nakba, "catastrophe", for the events of 1947-48.

But as US statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts...

An Australian man who was arrested in Israel recently has now been formally charged with spying for Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation both in Australia and in Israel, and has faced an initial court hearing.

As reported by the ABC:

Eyad Abu Arja was arrested along with his wife when he arrived at Tel Aviv airport in March, and has been in custody ever since.

AIJAC guest and Middle East expert Dr. Michael Rubin spoke with 2GB's Alan Jones in Sydney on the current situation in the Middle East.

As Sharyn Mittelman noted earlier today, the evidence is overwhelming that the planned Gaza flotilla is much more about creating a political confrontation with Israel than about ameliorating the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Initial reports emerged yesterday of an Israeli delivery driver who narrowly avoided being lynched by an Arab mob. This follows a similar incident last November, when four students, including one Australian tourist were stoned by a mob after taking a wrong turn and driving through an Arab neighbourhood. Melanie Lidman has now written the rather shocking full story of yesterday's incident in The Jerusalem Post:

Nachson was going towards Ma'aleh Adumim to deliver a package for his delivery company, Cheetah, when he attempted to make a shortcut near the Hadassah Har Hatzofim Hospital to avoid traffic.

The Palestinian Authority is busily lobbying European nations to support a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state by the United Nations this September. The reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah appears to be targeted towards the same end. As such, it is worth considering what the outcome of such a move would be. Would it create a Palestinian state in accordance with international law? Would it end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

This September, the Palestinian Authority (PA) intends to go to the United Nations to seek support for a unilateral declaration of a sovereign Palestinian state - a move that will intensify rather than end the conflict, setting the entire peace process back by years if not decades.

Having shunned repeated Israeli attempts to negotiate a two-state solution without preconditions over the past two and a half years - including during Israel's historic settlement freeze in 2009-10 - the Palestinians' goal in approaching the UN is, as noted historian Benny Morris put it, "to establish a Palestinian Arab state encompassing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, but without recognising Israel or making peace with it."

British journalist and author Malise Ruthven has written an article for the New York Review of Books, later re-published in the Australian Financial Review (June 17), examining the history of Syria in the wake of the recent unrest, and especially the domination of the country by the minority Alawite sect since around 1963. In that article, he featured a very revealing and important quote from the 1930s.

It occurs in a 1936 letter sent by six Syrian Alawite leaders to Leon Blum, the Prime Minister of France. At the time, France was overseeing Syria under a League of Nations mandate. The Alawite leaders were concerned that France was encouraging negotiations leading to a unified independent Syria dominated by the Sunni majority, which would leave the Alawites a powerless and persecuted minority.

When US President Barack Obama first made his controversial reference to the 1967 lines as the basis for future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on May 19, 2011, he introduced one main caveat that stuck out: the idea that there would be "mutually agreed swaps" of land between the two sides. He added that both sides were entitled to "secure and recognised borders." But the inclusion of land swaps also raised many questions.

An article in last month's AIR entitled "Are Australian Tax Dollars indirectly funding BDS?" looked at revelations from the October 2010 Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee - Budget Supplementary Estimates Committee hearings which suggested that it was possible that Australian tax dollars were funding elements of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel through the federal government's international aid agency, AusAID.

Even a quick look at various Palestinian officials' statements over the past few weeks can reveal an inconsistent and somewhat confusing picture of the Palestinian Authority's (PA) official policy regarding the alternatives of negotiations with Israel and their plans to try to get UN recognition of Palestinian statehood in September.

NEXT week a flotilla carrying so-called activists from various countries under the guise of "humanitarian concern" will set sail for the Gaza Strip, determined to break what they call "the siege of Gaza". Four Australians, including former Greens MLC Sylvia Hale, will be aboard.

This latest anti-Israel provocation comes on the anniversary of last year's ostensibly "humanitarian" flotilla which, likewise, sought to breach Israel's legal naval blockade of Gaza.

During that incident, nine Turkish passengers on board the Mavi Marmara died following a premeditated and vicious attack on Israeli soldiers by a group of shipboard activists.

Last year's flotilla was organised by the Turkish group IHH, which has extensive links to Islamist terror groups, including Hamas. Although IHH has now pulled out of the upcoming flotilla, citing "technical reasons", it has nonetheless been extensively involved in its preparations.

In a press release a few weeks ago, the Australian contingent said their goal was to "break the Israeli blockade of Gaza".

They believe that "Gaza will not be free so long as the Israeli siege destroys the territory's economy".

No, Gaza will not be free so long as Hamas continues to control the Gaza Strip. But then again, there was not a single mention of Hamas in their press release. Why?

Tomorrow will mark 5 years since kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit has been held illegally by Hamas in Gaza. As Isabel Kershner has reported in the New York Times, Hamas has again refused a request from the Red Cross to visit Shalit - so that they could merely ascertain what kind of conditions he is being held in and whether he is alive or dead.

The International Committee of the Red Cross on Thursday publicly demanded that Hamas provide proof that an Israeli soldier captured five years ago and held in Gaza is still alive. Hamas promptly rejected the demand.

Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour has just come out and stated that even if negotiations with Israel were to recommence, the Palestinians will go to the UN and ask for recognition of statehood. Haaretz reports:

The Palestinians will seek membership as an independent state at the UN in September even if peace negotiations with Israel are underway, the Palestinian UN envoy said on Thursday.

Amid increased tensions surrounding the impending UN vote on Palestinian statehood and the new unity deal between Hamas and rival Fatah, Israel has been quietly easing its blockade on Gaza - which is in place in order to prevent Hamas militants from smuggling in weapons with which to attack Israel. News surfaced overnight that Israel has approved $100 million of new buildings in Gaza, which is a significant development seeing that Israel is often criticised for its restrictions on importing building materials - which can be used to build military infrastructure such as bunkers - into the enclave.

This Update deals with the proposed additional flotilla to Gaza being organised - probably for later this month - by the same people who organised the Mavi Marmara flotilla last year. It further includes some material on the way various non-governmental organisations (NGOs), often with support from Western governments, are making a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace more difficult, including by prompting efforts like these flotillas.

First up is British columnist Melanie Phillips, who points out that the latest flotilla effort is more nakedly than ever a propaganda stunt to attempt to make Israel look bad, with no conceivable humanitarian purpose, despite the claims of the organisers. She notes that it comes at about the same time that Gaza is about to open its second shopping mall. She also discusses a plan by flotilla organisers to attempt to organise masses of protesters flying into Ben Gurion airport to disrupt traffic and create a propaganda stunt.

This Update features three notable pieces on the Palestinian efforts to have the UN recognise a Palestinian state in "the '67 lines" in September, without negotiations or compromise with Israel.

First up is noted American Middle East expert Prof. Fouad Ajami, who strongly argues that the effort is futile. He deals at length with the contention often heard that the UN "created" Israel and can therefore likewise "create" Palestine, noting that it was not the UN, but the concrete achievements of the "Yishuv", the Jewish community in Palestinian, which actually created Israel. Ajami also puts the Palestinian tactics in some historical perspective, arguing they are redolent of Yasser Arafat's past delusions that the Palestinian could have "it all" without compromising with Israel.

Following a week of dramatic speeches and meetings in Washington featuring US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, two conclusions have emerged. On the positive side, the United States and Israel alliance, though not always perfect, is strong and enduring. Worryingly, however, prospects for advancing peace between Israel and the Palestinians appears more elusive today than for a very long time.

On May 19, President Obama's major State Department speech outlining US foreign policy in the Middle East focussed primarily on American reactions to the "Arab Spring" sweeping the region, but also reflected US thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"We need to be wary of the rise of the polemicist. Polemic is different from journalism."

This simple statement from veteran journalist Paul Kelly at a session of the recent Sydney Writers' Festival seems as if it should go without saying. Unfortunately, it served as a rather ominous warning for those attending other sessions at the partially tax-payer funded Festival.

On Israel/Palestine issues, this year's Festival featured two high-profile international guests with important things to say related to the Middle East - Palestinian doctor and writer Izzeldin Abuelaish, who lost three daughters in the 2008-9 Gaza war, and British novelist Howard Jacobson. Both of these figures have very positive messages, promoting a genuine Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace and reconciliation. However, the program and atmosphere of the Festival managed to both prevent their positive views from being fully explored, and constantly pitted them against much more extreme Australian voices.

When Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu visited London last month, Cameron recited the familiar mantra of Britain's "unshakeable commitment" to Israel's security. But he went on to seamlessly warn that unless Israel sits down with the Palestinians to negotiate a peace deal, Britain will recognise Palestinian statehood if the UN General Assembly votes on the issue in September.

In Cameron's bizarre view, the "Arab Spring", the killing of bin Laden and the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement had opened up opportunities not only to defeat terrorism but also to expand democracy, spread liberty, and, not least, to make progress at the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating table.

If only. If Cameron's assessment were true, Israelis of all political hues would already be initialling treaties and rolling out red carpets for dignitaries who would be preparing to descend on Jerusalem for a full-blown peace ceremony.

Israel has learned in recent weeks that despite the social upheaval and political turbulence across the Middle East, Washington continues to focus on delivering an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. This is what President Barack Obama made plain to Netanyahu during a meeting May 20 after which the two exchanged carefully phrased but pointed statements of disagreement during a joint appearance in the Oval Office.

Obama's call, both during the meeting and in a speech the previous day, to set the 1967 borders as a basis for future peace talks between Israel and a prospective Palestinian state, prompted Netanyahu to tell Obama, in the media's presence, that the 1967 borders "were boundaries of repeated wars," and that the nine-mile distance at one point between the West Bank and the Mediterranean "is half the width of the Washington beltway."

Peace is not made solely through agreements, it is made through both sides accepting each other's legitimacy and working together. BDS and other attacks on Israel's existence have only ever served to vindicate the voices saying that peace and reconciliation are impossibilities. Well-meaning people have been duped by this movement into thinking that they are fighting for human rights. However the policy today is as malicious as the boycott of Jewish settlements was in 1922. For all its carefully-framed rhetoric, its leaders have but one true aim, which they occasionally admit - to end the Jewish state.

Although PA officials have indicated that security cooperation with Israel will continue, it is difficult to imagine how the Palestinian power-sharing arrangement will not hinder that partnership - Hamas has long called for Israel's destruction and most of the Israeli-PA security efforts have been based on preventing Hamas terrorists from gaining a foothold in the West Bank. This is perhaps the biggest test of Abbas' credibility; while he is assuring Washington, the EU, and Israel that little will change given his commitment to coexistence, questions abound.

Even in the year 2011 - as happened in the year 1948 - even a relative moderate like Abbas simply cannot bring himself to say in Arabic: "Let's share this land in a two-state solution."

Ironically, Netanyahu is taking a liberal and flexible position while Abbas is taking a reactionary, imperialistic stance. Talk about accepting the "other"!

And yet not a single professor in any university class, not a single journalist or expert in the mass media will raise or even report that point. President Obama won't pick up on it to chide the Palestinians. Nobody will start calling Netanyahu moderate and peace-seeking while saying that Abbas is extremist and peace-rejecting.

Was there ever a time when anti-Israel students felt afraid? Certainly, anti-Zionist fundamentalists, thuggish Israel-bashers and others have been in institutions where they have lost sympathy, debates and votes. But have they ever had to navigate an environment of threats and intimidation?

Have pro-Palestinian, pan-Arab or expansionist Islamist voices been shouted down, physically attacked, bullied or harassed on Australian campuses or in other forums?

I am not talking about anti-Muslim or anti-Arab prejudice, bigotry and racism - which does exist and can have violent manifestations - but thuggish attacks on people seeking to advocate a political position.

On May 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a historic address to a joint meeting of the US Congress, saying he was willing to "make painful compromises", including relinquishing "parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland", in pursuit of peace with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu acknowledged that, "a Palestinian state must be big enough to be viable, independent and prosperous". However, as US President Obama recently noted, the border will have to be different to the 15-kilometre ceasefire line that existed prior to Israel's defensive war of June 1967.

Simply put, Israel cannot return to those indefensible borders.

While most Middle East observers have felt considerable hope in the wake of the "Arab Spring" mass movements, this has always been mixed with varying degrees of trepidation. Today, some very knowledgeable key analysts are increasingly saying that the trepidation now looks more appropriate than the hope. This Update is devoted to a few of these more cautious and pessimistic views about what is currently occurring across the region.

First up is Professor Barry Rubin, who predicts a major collapse of the Obama Administration's policy hopes for the Middle East in September - not because of the Palestinian unilateral efforts at the UN, but because of the Egyptian elections.  He predicts very a destructive and radical government in Egypt following that poll, and presents a variety of evidence to support his view. He then enumerates a number of dangerous problems he sees arising, and also raises other problematic trends across the region, including in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.

Events in Washington relevant to the Middle East continue apace. Following US President Obama's Middle East policy speech last Thursday, Obama met with Israeli PM Netanyahu on Friday (a video of Netanyahu's remarks is here and a transcript is here, while video of Obama is here) and then spoke to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC on Sunday (a text of his remarks is here.) This Update deals with some of the key issues raised by the statements at all three events.

First up is former senior US official Elliot Abrams, who looks at how the AIPAC speech clarified the more controversial elements of the speech on Thursday. He notes the statement on Hamas was clearer, and the words President Obama used on borders was a correction to a mistake on Thursday, where he seemed to be suggesting that Israel could be forced completely back to the 1949 armistice lines if the Palestinians did not choose to agree to land swaps. Abrams notes a contradiction, however, that seemed to continue in the AIPAC speech, a recognition that Israel could not be expected to negotiate with a Palestinian Authority containing an unrepentantly rejectionist Hamas, and yet a demand seemed to be there for Israel to find some way to negotiate.

US President Barack Obama's speech outlining US Middle East policy in the wake of the Arab Spring movements was a watershed, detailing US support for reforms and democratisation.

However, its section on Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts unfortunately weakened several important points with flaws that may impede peace prospects.

As readers are probably aware, US President Barack Obama gave an important speech last night on US Middle East Policy in response to the Arab Spring - which can be read in full here, and can be viewed here. This Update deals with its policy statements across various issue areas as well as their ramifications.

First up is Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who discusses the implications of what Obama said particularly with respect to Israeli-Palestinian issues. He is critical of three elements of the speech which go beyond the Clinton parameters for a deal set back in 2000 - his enunciation of the principle that a deal should be "based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps," a rejection of an Israeli military presence in the Jordan valley in a deal, and "a borders-and-security-first approach, leaving the subjects of refugees and Jerusalem for future negotiations". Satloff points out that these are all US movements toward the Palestinian position - just as the Palestinian Authority had signed a highly destructive agreement with Hamas, and is likely to lead to a rift with Israeli PM Netanyahu, currently due in Washington.

This update deals with two related Israeli-Palestinian developments - a relatively hardline piece by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the New York Times on Tuesday, plus the "Naqba Day" clashes over the weekend (video here and here, some photos here), which for the first time saw major efforts by Palestinian residents of Syria and Lebanon to try to cross the border into Israel, leading to considerable casualties.

First up is a response by David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, expressing disappointment and concern at the content of Abbas' opinion piece, which Harris argues, not only effectively says no to a negotiated peace, but re-writes 60 years of history. He takes particular issue with the matters Abbas elides or misrepresents regarding what happened in 1948 and the period up until 1967. He says that Abbas' defence of moves to gain unilateral support for Palestinian statehood without negotations is likely to "effectively end the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

ASKED in July 2009, in the aftermath of the Gaza War, if Australia would deal with the Palestinian government if Hamas were to be included, Julia Gillard was unequivocal in her response: "Hamas obviously is a terrorist organisation that has been engaged in violent actions against the Israeli people, and in order to be part of any process it needs to completely renounce that violence."

So it should stand to reason that following the announcement last week that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah group and rival Hamas had agreed to end their long-standing feud and form a unity government, the Australian government must re-assess its relations with the Palestinian Authority.

But in Tuesday night's budget, it was announced that "Australian aid to the Palestinian territories and Palestinian refugees in surrounding regions will double to around $70 million per annum by 2012-13".

Included within that, is money that will go directly to the PA to "improve its operations and assist in the delivery of services".

This Update returns to the subject of the Fatah-Hamas deal and focuses especially on the implications of the deal for the Palestinians and their aspirations.

First up is noted French philosopher and public intellectual Bernard-Henry Levy, whose reaction to those who imagine that this deal could be good for the Palestinians or peace prospects is to repeat the words of French Premier Edouard Daladier when he was greeted by cheering crowds after appeasing Hitler at Munich in 1938 - "Oh! The Fools!" He argues that PA President Mahmoud Abbas has essentially undone all the good work he has done for Palestinian credibility and normal life over recent years. Even bigger losers, he argues, are the 1.5 million Gazans condemned to the totalitarian, terrorist rule of Hamas with its penchant for eternal conflict, as well as the whole "Arab spring" movement.

Professor Amin Saikal's one-sided ode to Hamas, published on The Drum, overlooks one issue - that Hamas is a terrorist organisation which refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist.

Saikal would have us believe that "Hamas has emerged as a pragmatic Islamist movement" and that therefore Israel and the international community should embrace Hamas as a negotiating partner.

If Hamas is pragmatic, then I would not like to imagine what an extremist group looks like. Perhaps a brief reminder as to Hamas's raison d'être is in order.

In Amin Saikal's article "Palestinians' High Hopes" (May 6) he naively describes the Fatah-Hamas unity pact as likely to enhance prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. In fact, the effect is very much likely to be the reverse.

Saikal, like some other analysts, implores Israel to negotiate with Hamas and insists the internationally-designated terrorist group has become "pragmatic." Yet he makes no suggestion that Hamas should be required to amend its Charter to recognise Israel and abide by the pre-conditions for participation in the peace process established by the International Quartet (the UN, US, European Union and Russia) in 2006. Hamas has refused to accept these eminently sensible pre-conditions for a seat at the table, namely: recognition of Israel, renouncing terror and accepting all previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements and obligations.

As readers are probably aware, Hamas and Fatah signed a unity deal on Wednesday, following up on their announcement of the deal last week. This Update contains two pieces on the details and implications of that agreement.

First up is Washington Institute scholar David Makovsky who looks at the deal, the background that brought it about, and its implications for security and governance for both the Palestinians and Israel. He also examines the considerable challenges the deal will pose for US Middle East policy, including in terms of the considerable aid Washington provides to the PA at the moment. He is particularly good on the challenges that the pact will face from Israeli opposition, the loss of the internationally highly-regarded Palestinian PM Salam Fayad, and the potential loss of security support from Israel and the US.

Rather than making a move in the interest of their people, Hamas and Fatah may be uniting in order to ward-off the possible consequences of the recent upheaval in the Middle East and maintain their grip on power.

Robert Danin writes in foreignaffairs.com that the recent Hamas-Fatah unity agreement may be a self-preservation initiative by both parties. Hamas, he argues, has suffered a massive blow as a result of the unrest in Syria and therefore is facing an uncertain future.

There is so much material being published on the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday by US forces that this Update will not attempt to duplicate the widely reported news. Instead, it will focus on pieces providing an unusual perspective or analysing some under-reported elements and implications of this event.

First up is Barry Rubin who, in his usual insightful fashion, tries to place this event in some sort of historical context of the larger Islamist movement. Importantly, he argues that the Islamist movement extends way beyond the fate of al-Qaeda, and that other Islamist groups which are seeking to exploit state power - including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt - may be even more important and more dangerous in the long run.

This Update deals with the implication of the surprise Fatah-Hamas Palestinian unity deal, announced on Wednesday.

First up, summarising what is known and not known about the details of the deal, and their possible ramifications, is a useful briefing paper from the British-Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). The paper points out that while the deal is ostensibly based on an Egyptian-brokered agreement rejected by Hamas in 2009, it is clear that further modifications have been introduced, but it is not publicly known what they are. It goes on to outline the dilemmas the agreement will pose for both Israel and other international players.

The Palestinian Authority's actions speak louder than words. As Jews around the world prepare to celebrate Passover, the Palestinian Authority has offered its own unique gift to the Jewish people honouring Hamas terrorist Abbas Al-Sayed, and in the process, demonstrating yet again why genuine peace is so elusive.

Probably no document in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has done more damage to the reputation of Israel, nor contributed more to the international campaign to boycott and delegitimise it, than the Goldstone Report. That is why Justice Goldstone's mea culpa in a Washington Post op-ed on 1 April was so breathtaking.

Richard Goldstone, chair of the commission which authored the UN Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) Goldstone Report into the Gaza War of 2008-09, has now conceded that, regarding Israel, "if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

In particular, he now agrees that the most inflammatory and absurd of the report's conclusions - that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians "as a matter of policy" - is baseless. He also concedes that Israeli authorities are reasonably investigating every specific allegation of misconduct by its soldiers during the Gaza war. Hamas, by contrast, he points out, has done "nothing."

Unfortunately, Justice Goldstone's change of heart cannot undo the massive, irreparable damage he and his co-commissioners originally inflicted through their report. This damage is not only to Israel's reputation but also to Middle East peace prospects, and to the very notion of a responsible and universal system of international law.

There was no possible mistake; the Hamas operative who fired it hit exactly what he was aiming at - a clearly identifiable, distinctively yellow school bus.

This was not a weapon Hamas could ever hope to manufacture for itself in Gaza. In fact, the Kornet is made only in Russia by KBP Industries, and then sold only under licence from the Russian Government - usually exclusively to states.

So how did Hamas get one? Very likely from Syria, which has bought Kornets from Russia, and is known to pass on advanced weapons to terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. It was probably smuggled via Egypt and through the tunnels under the Sinai border into Gaza.

In significant contrast to his initial report, Goldstone now asserts that civilians were not intentionally targeted by Israel as a matter of policy during the Gaza campaign and that estimates of Palestinian civilian casualties may have been exaggerated.

Amid efforts to relaunch and sustain Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Israel's claim for recognition as a Jewish State continues to generate controversy. While Israel's leaders have insisted that such recognition is fundamental to any peace agreement, Palestinian and other Arab leaders have responded to the claim with consistent and widespread antipathy. To begin to explore how this issue might be appropriately addressed in the context of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, we must consider the nature and legitimacy of the interests at stake and examine the alternatives for addressing them.

Israel's 'guilt' had in fact already been pre-determined before the world even knew of Justice Goldstone, when the original resolution establishing the fact-finding mission declared Israel had committed "grave violations".

Unfortunately, Goldstone's change of heart cannot undo the massive, irreparable damage he and his co-commissioners have inflicted through their report.

As readers may or may not have heard, there was a particularly heinous attack from Gaza on an Israeli school bus yesterday, which fortunately did not kill anyone, but did wound one child severely, as well as the bus driver. Reports says Hamas' military wing claimed responsibility. This was accompanied by a large rocket and mortar barrage on Israel from Gaza.

As most readers are probably aware, Justice Richard Goldstone, the head of the UN Human Rights Council's much-discussed "Goldstone Commission" into the 2008-2009 Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, published a recantation in the April 1 Washington Post of many of the report's key findings. This Update deals with the implications of his volte face.

The Itamar massacre highlighted that, for far too long, the international community has ignored or downplayed the ongoing and systematic contributions to this infrastructure of incitement by the official organs of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This Update concentrates on the possibly highly significant outbreak of widespread unrest in Syria, and the growing Israeli-Palestinian violence, especially around Gaza.

We begin with a report on the unrest in Syria from Roee Nahmias, an Israeli journalist specialising in Lebanon and Syria. He points out the current unrest is the most significant in Syria since the Hama massacre of 1982, and the first time Bashar al-Assad has had to use significant force to put down opposition, and thus a test of his willingness to shed blood.

This Update focuses on the implications and aftermath of the Itamar terrorist attack on Friday night, when assailants entered a home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar and murdered five members of the Fogel family, including a three-month-old baby and two other children. This horrific attack has political implications, because, as Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post documents, the Palestinian Authority's initial response appeared half-hearted, leading to both an American implication that more was expected, and some critical words from Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu. Moreover, official Palestinian media claimed that it was not Palestinians who carried out the attack.

Israeli lawyer and activist Nitsana Darshan-Leitner speaks on "Fighting Terrorism: One Lawsuit at a Time" for the Hans & Gini Bachrach Memorial Oration in Melbourne, Australia, 14 February 2011

Libya and the Arab revolutions had to play second fiddle to a Palestinian resolution to condemn Israel, which was always likely to fail thanks to a US veto

The PA, Shaath said, will continue to lobby for international recognition of Palestine's "inalienable right" to declare its independence; but did vow that the PA will ultimately seek a negotiated settlement

Over the past month, the Sydney Morning Herald's coverage of Israel has been noticeably one-sided, even by its usual standards. What was particularly noteworthy was the fervour with which the Herald covered the so-called "Palestine Papers".

In order to advance their particular story, al-Jazeera and the Guardian have had to misread or misrepresent significant portions of the text, omit other key sections, and demonstrate virtually no appreciation for the history of the negotiations.

[The study] does not mean that Fayyad should not be supported. He remains almost certainly better than any alternative. But it does mean there should be some scepticism directed at Fayyad's claims to be building the institutions of statehood. That is not true if those institutions are completely dependent on a huge, ongoing flow of foreign aid.

The dry forest on the Israeli-Lebanese border provided shade but little relief. Rain had not fallen for months, and the blistering season-long heat wave that would later set parts of northern Israel on fire was currently burning down forests in Russia.

Palestinian political elites, of both the so-called "secular" and Islamist varieties, are dead set against partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine with the Jews. They regard all of Palestine as their patrimony and believe that it will eventually be theirs.

Today's Update focuses on the collection of alleged Palestinian documents being released by al-Jazeera and the Guardian which is currently in the news. While most of this Update will feature analysis of the significance of the revelations in the documents, it if first worthwhile pointing to some aspects of what the documents actually reportedly reveal which appear to being reported incorrectly, or incompletely

A worrying trend from the Palestinian Diaspora has infiltrated the PA leadership - the idea of cutting ties and cooperation with Israel. This has manifested itself both as an attempt to boycott Israel and thus cut economic and social ties, as well as eschewing negotiations in favour of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood.

This first Update of 2011 contains two new pieces on the always troublesome situation in Gaza, especially in the wake of escalating violence sparked by rocket fire into Israel from there in late December.

Today's Update looks at the strategy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) following the unequivocal signs that it will not be returning to negotiations - direct or indirect - with Israel anytime soon.

There is no reason to believe that a second moratorium on construction in settlements would have led to a breakthrough. The Palestinian Authority (PA) repeatedly asserted that it would not agree to resume talks for a mere extension of the previous freeze, which ended in September. In that phase, the PA wasted nine months of the ten-month moratorium before even agreeing to talk.

When talking about West Bank settlements, a common talking-point among those who seek to paint them as a major obstacle to peace is to claim their growth is accelerating.

The recent announcement that the US Obama Administration has ended efforts to negotiate a 90-day extension of Israel's moratorium on West Bank settlement construction is more opportunity than embarrassment.

Unfortunately (and unfortunately typically), McGeough's various articles about the flotilla - including the one honoured at the Walkleys - were skewed by bias and replete with factual errors.

Though pundits focus on the question of settlements or the current temperature of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, UNRWA's institutionalisation of refugee-cum-military camps is the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Today's Update continues the theme of analysing the latest impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace making. We begin with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon who, in his usual direct manner, nails the issue: that Palestinians have retreated from previous agreed-upon positions, remain obstructionist in most matters of negotiating an agreement, and that settlements are not the obstacle on the road to peace.

The US government has announced it is no longer seeking a second Israeli moratorium on construction in settlements for 90 days. This is because the administration "concluded that even if Mr. Netanyahu persuaded his cabinet to accept a freeze - which he had not yet been able to do - the 90-day negotiating period would not have produced the progress on core issues that the United States originally had sought."

Today's Update features some new writing on some of the real barriers to an Israeli-Palestinian two state peace. First up is well-known Israeli columnist and writer Ari Shavit, who says the latest Wikileaks revelations show that the West' accepted dogma about the Middle East is wrong, and this is what is blocking peace.

Whitley carefully specified he was not presenting UNRWA's political position, and made clear his primary concern was the current welfare of the generations of Palestinians still living in a "state of limbo" more than 60 years after their ancestors left what is today Israel. But his remarks nonetheless sparked a firestorm of criticism from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Arab governments, Palestinian activists and Hamas.

In constructing mythology, which in effect is what McGeough is attempting, only one side of a story is provided, with inconvenient facts glossed over or omitted. Nevertheless, the extent to which McGeough does this is, at times, simply breathtaking.

As readers may be aware, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu is reportedly taking to his cabinet a deal put on the table by the American Administration in exchange for an additional three months moratorium on construction in West Bank settlements, and it is expected to narrowly pass.

Today's Update contains some comments on the latest exchange of complaints between Washington and Jerusalem regarding an Israeli approval of one stage of plans to build new apartments in Jewish neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

As readers will be aware, US mid-term elections last week saw major gains for the Republican party at the expense of US President Barack Obama's Democrats. While the election primarily focussed on domestic political issues, this Update will focus on analysis discussing the effects, if any, of the changed Washington political scene on US Middle East policy.

With additional terrorism attempts again in the news, first a bombing plot on Washington subways, and then an apparent attempt to bring down cargo planes with package bombs from Yemen, plus earlier reported efforts to stage Mumbai-style attacks in Europe, this Update concentrates on new trends in terrorism.

A furore has erupted in Israeli and foreign media over Israel's self-description as a Jewish and democratic state, its demand that Palestinians recognise this as part of a final peace and a proposed amendment to an existing oath of loyalty for naturalised Israeli citizens to include the phrase 'Jewish and democratic state.'

One of the most pervasive myths about the Middle East is "linkage", the belief that the Arab-Israel conflict is the key to solving all other Middle Eastern problems, from the Iranian nuclear program, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to international terrorism, ethnic strife...

It is annoyingly predictable. When progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace emerges, Mahmoud Abbas issues demands and threats, while world leaders scramble to appease him. So, once again, we await the Palestinian Authority president's decision.

According to reports, with the peace process stalled, Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad has resumed issuing public statments about his plans to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state in August 2011 and simply seek UN endorsement. Israel says Palestinian unilateralism will be met with Israeli unilateralism.

Today's Update features three pieces relating to the question of how Arabs, especially the Palestinian public and the Arab states, look at the prospects of an Israeli-Palestinian two-state agreement.

The upcoming BDS resolution at the ACTU is both sad and absurd. All Australian unionists in favour of Israeli-Palestinian peace will either vote against the resolution, or unwittingly prolong the conflict.

This Update features pieces on the current stalemate in renewing the peace process, the prospects for ending the stalemate and the implications for the longer term.

As readers are probably aware, Israel's 10-month moratorium on new housing construction in West Bank settlements came to an end on Sunday night. It still remains unclear whether Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will follow through on repeated threats to pull out of peace talks in response, with an Arab League meeting called on Monday to discuss the subject. This Update looks at the current situation.

The looming expiration of the settlement building freeze poses a dilemma for Netanyahu. While politically he cannot deliver the complete cessation of all building over the 1949 armistice lines the Palestinians are demanding, he can probably limit building to the settlement blocs most observers expect Israeli will keep, as part of land swaps, in any final peace.

I trust most readers of the AIR are aware that the years surrounding 1948 saw a two-way population exodus. In addition to the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled from the area that became the State of Israel, a probably slightly larger number of Jews fled various other Middle Eastern countries, largely to come to Israel.

Tony Blair is a rare exception to the European rule. He has genuine boots-on-the-ground knowledge of Israel and the Palestinian areas - the West Bank in particular - and he has the political courage to reach beyond the clapped-out political cliches. He has sympathy for both sides, but his concern for the Palestinians is not uncritical. Rather, it is realistic and practical.

The launch on Sept. 2 of direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations after 15 months of relentless groundwork marks the third attempt in a decade to resolve the outstanding core issues pertaining to a two-state solution. Many on both sides question whether Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas have sufficient will or ability to make the necessary sacrifices – the main factor in determining whether this round of peacemaking will fare better than its predecessors at Camp David and Annapolis.

A year ago, Fayyad introduced a two-year plan for laying down the armature of a future Palestinian state with an emphasis on economic development, security and bureaucratic housecleaning. The goal was to end the corrupt, Tammany-style system of patronage that formerly defined the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and create transparent and accountable institutions beholden to no one party, particularly Fatah. Halfway through, Fayyad's two year-program is working.

The Naqba is the heart of the Palestinians' backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land's native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel's independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Naqba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just gave a speech in the US in which he again emphasised the need, as part of a peace agreement, to recognise Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. This Update deals with why this seemingly symbolic question of recognition is so important to both the Israeli government and, according to polls, the Israeli public.

US President Barack Obama gave a major speech on Iraq last week to mark the promised withdrawal of all US combat troops from Iraq by the end of August. However, rather than discuss the speech itself, this Update looks at the future of Iraq now that coalition forces are no longer doing most of the fighting, and the Western foreign policy challenge given the changed situation in the country.

YESTERDAY in Washington, President Barack Obama formally launched the resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians after a 19-month hiatus. International expectations for the talks are low because there appear to be a number of factors that make peace breakthroughs seem unlikely. Yet other factors offer room for cautious optimism for modest progress.

Following the Israeli-Palestinian Summit in Washington yesterday (in which the details of discussions were kept discreet), this Update features some comments on Hamas' role as a potential spoiler in the wake of the Hamas terror attack Tuesday, which left four Israeli civilians dead, and a second non-fatal attack Wednesday night - with the Palestinian Authority predicting more such efforts by Hamas.

As readers are doubtless aware, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu is meeting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas today in Washington in a summit designed to formally re-launch direct Israeli Palestinian peace talks. This Update offers background on the situation and participants and differing analysis about the prospects of success of the talks scheduled to follow.

Israelis have been much focused in recent weeks on the testimony of various top officials to the Turkel inquiry - looking into the flotilla clash off Gaza on May 31 that left nine Turkish activists dead. On top of this, the Israeli government has made an unprecedented decision to cooperate with an inquiry under former New Zealand PM Geoffrey Palmer set up by the UN Secretary-General.

There are few journalists specialising in strategic and security affairs more experienced than Ron Ben Yishai. After fighting as a paratrooper in the Six Day War, Ben Yishai turned to journalism full time. Since then he has covered, from the battlefield, the Yom Kippur War, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the first and second Lebanon wars, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the NATO operation in Kosovo, the Russian-Chechen violence in 2000 and more. He has been wounded three times while covering various battlefields from the front line.

News stories about bodies found at sea are occasionally published by Gaza newspapers. The number of such bodies isn't huge, yet not all those drowning victims chose to go swimming voluntarily. The Gazans who found their death at sea include mid-level officials at sensitive government ministries, the Interior Ministry for example, alongside police and security officers. Some of them were shot in the head before being sent on their swim. There is a common denominator to these deaths: All of the victims were designated as traitors by the secret service of Hamas' military wing in charge of counter-espionage and executed as collaborators.

It's been a decade since Israeli and Palestinian leaders met as peacemakers only to part at loggerheads. Now, with most of the Camp David summit's protagonists long gone from the scene, that ill-fated conclave's military, diplomatic and political repercussions are seen on both sides of the conflict as seminal. Led at the time by celebrated warrior and reputed risk-taker Ehud Barak, most Israelis expected the summit to produce a final-status deal between Israel and the Palestinians creating a Palestinian state, whose establishment was assumed to be just a matter of time.

What struck me then, and continues to strike me, was their complete lack of concern, sometimes even contempt, for the human beings they claimed to champion and the hatred for the human beings on the other side of the political divide. There was no regard for Palestinians who sought co-existence with Israelis, just uncritical support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The idea of institution building, self-determination of individuals or developing any paradigm which could lead to a win-win outcome were simply not on the agenda.

In four decades of reading about international affairs and Middle Eastern geopolitics, I do not think I have come across a work of history that more fully illuminates the true sources of Palestinian terrorism and irresolvable conflict with the realities of Israel than does Efraim Karsh's Palestine Betrayed.

As readers will be aware, following a statement by the Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia), which you can read here, the Israelis and Palestinian leaders have agreed to a Sept. 2 Summit in Washington to launch much-delayed direct talks. This Update analyses the prospects of the Summit and subsequent talks. Putting the more optimistic view of these prospects is Washington Institute scholar David Makovsky. He points out the surge in cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in recent years, as well as the positive reforms in the West Bank from Palestinian PM Salam Fayad.

The US government is reportedly expecting that direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks may finally be announced - after months of efforts - as soon as Monday. This Update deals with why it has taken so long to get to this point and what to expect if direct talks actually do resume.

This Update features some new material on Hamas, its goals and its efforts to control Gaza. And it also has an important and detailed look at the increasingly complex relationship between Israel and the Arab states in the face of the Iranian hegemonic threat.

As readers are probably aware, there was a significant clash between Israeli forces and the Lebanese Army yesterday, which left a total of five people dead. This Update deals with both this incident, as well as the prospects for renewed direct Israeli-Palestinian talks in the wake of last week's decision by the Arab League to approve such talks.

There does seem to be one prediction on which most election analysts agree - the Australian Greens are likely to wind up controlling the balance of power in the Senate. This will be worrying to many in the Australian Jewish community because not only does the Greens party's membership base seem, on past form, susceptible to radical anti-Zionism, but some of the party's official policies look strongly concerning - to say the least.

All of a sudden we have seen a different type of meeting between Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Obama. And a major effort on the part of the President, for the first time since his election, to be nice to the Israeli people by giving an interview to an Israeli journalist. They have reached the conclusion that keeping a distance from Israel, picking unnecessary fights with Israel, was not going to advance the peace process. They have reached the conclusion that by distancing themselves from Bibi, from Israel, they are not getting anything in return from the Arab world. And therefore, the change.

EHUD Barak and Yasser Arafat, smiling broadly, jostled before the world's cameras to see who could enter the door last. It was Camp David, the US presidential retreat in Maryland, and the world waited as the Israeli and Palestinian leaders attempted to conclude a permanent peace agreement. This weekend marks 10 years since those talks ended in failure, and when measured against the thousands of lives since needlessly lost, it's hard to remember that people were actually hopeful about their success.

This Update features a look at the details that have been released from Israel's military investigation into the Gaza flotilla incident on May 30 (obviously, the major state inquiry led by Justice Turkel is still under way, as is an investigation by Israel's Controller-General.) It also includes some additional examinations of the situation in Gaza more than a month after the flotilla incident.

There could be few greater blows to peace hopes than an unconditional lifting of the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Empowered by Iranian funds, expertise and armaments, Hamas would become much better able to take on both Israel and the PA, with its reputation vastly enhanced. Hezbollah in non-blockaded Lebanon, now armed with Scuds and other advanced weaponry, would be the model.

It is worth noting one more thing that Abbas said in Washington, not to the Jewish leaders this time to but to President Obama. According to Haaretz (June 13), he reportedly told the President he is opposed to lifting the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip because this would bolster Hamas. Analysts have been saying as much, despite what the PA says in public. Informed observers should be aware that, privately, Mahmoud Abbas reportedly wants the Gaza blockade to remain, as the analysts allege.

As elsewhere, the Israeli military confrontation of activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla's MV Mavi Marmara on May 31 put Israel at the centre of fiery rhetoric in Southeast Asia over recent weeks. In Indonesia, demonstrations were staged in Jakarta and regional cities over several days.

There is general agreement here that Israel has made mistakes before and during its navy's May 31 fatal clash with the flotilla's main vessel some 100 kilometres into the Mediterranean, southwest of Tel Aviv. However, there is also general agreement that the broader picture is about tectonic movements that Israel in no way caused, and whose damage it must prevent. In the narrow military sense, the IDF concedes it walked into an ambush, when it landed a minimally armed and vastly outnumbered commando squadron into a mob wielding iron bars, axes, clubs and knives. The subsequent battle, which left nine of the boat's 600 passengers dead and eight of the 50 commandos who confronted them wounded – caught Israel off guard militarily, politically and strategically. The military failure, Israeli experts generally agree, was not in terms of the battle's management once it had erupted. On the contrary, for a small unit that boarded the ship incrementally with the naïve plan of paintballing a crowd of presumably non-violent activists, the troops' performance was actually impressive. The speed, poise and efficiency with which they shifted to battle mode were proof that the IDF’s naval commando is as resourceful and well trained as he is widely assumed to be. The problem was in the intelligence.

Hamas will be in power in the Gaza Strip for a long time. Who is going to remove it? It is a client of Iran. Certainly it is under embargo for arms but it does function a lot like an independent state for daily practical purposes. It will return to war against Israel at the first opportunity. It teaches its people to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map and to be terrorists. That doesn't mean all Gazans support it, but those who don't can do nothing about it. Moreover, the Hamas regime receives indirect aid, due to the Palestinian Authority paying much of its civil service and Western projects designed to help Gaza's people.

When asked to respond to a statement by Israeli spokesman Mark Regev that Israel was happy to take and deliver the humanitarian aid, it seemed McGeough had to remind himself he was meant to be a journalist, rather than one of the activists.

As readers may be aware, the public campaign for the release of Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in a raid across the Gaza border four years ago, has heated up in Israel in recent weeks (though it has been a highly important and emotional issue since his capture). This Update looks at the reasons why the plight of this one soldier is so keenly felt in Israel.

As readers will be aware, the Israeli cabinet announced a major easing of the blockade of Gaza on Sunday, whereby from now on all items not on a list of prohibited and dual-use items will be allowed in. This Update looks at the new rules for the blockade.

The tragic events of May 31 - when 9 Turkish blockade runners were killed in a clash with Israeli troops at sea - has focused attention on the current situation in Gaza. Unfortunately, much that is being said about the history and current reality of that unhappy territory is poorly informed. Crowded, resource-poor Gaza has never been a particularly pleasant place to live. Slated to be part of a Palestinian state under the 1947 UN partition plan, when the Arab states followed up their rejection of the plan with a military attack, Gaza ended up under neglectful Egyptian military rule. When Israel captured it in the 1967 war, the area was dirt poor, with unemployment topping 40%, and average GDP per capita around US$150 per year.

This Update focuses on some of the details of the Israeli decision to appoint an independent public Commission of Inquiry to look into the events of May 31, when 9 Turkish citizens were killed in a clash at sea as Israeli forces attempted to halt six ships running the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Why are supposed human rights activists so quick to attack Israel but never make a squeak against the anti-peace Hamas regime that persecutes women, Christians and homosexuals? Why does the Gaza flotilla bloodshed automatically cancel out the moral and legal imperative of maintaining Israel and Egypt's blockade of the Hamas-ruled Strip? These are the two questions that must be answered by those seeking to rollback the internationally sanctioned blockade of the Gaza Strip of materiel that can be used for military purposes. Fuel, medicines, gas, electricity and food have never stopped flowing into Gaza.

This Update looks at a much-remarked element of the recent crisis over the Gaza Flotilla, the role of Turkey before and after the violent confrontation of May 31. It also includes the most complete summary of what is known about the details of that confrontation that we have yet seen.

If Israel is forced to lift the blockade, the unintended result will be the death of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. If Hamas "beats" Israel and successfully arms like Hezbollah, ordinary Palestinians will believe violence (the Hamas path) is better than negotiations (the Fatah path). Fatah will either collapse or return to wholesale violence, putting peace efforts back 30 years.

A blockade [of Gaza] to prevent the re-arming of an enemy is an absolutely legitimate and recognized method of armed conflict - and Israel has provided all the required notifications to comply with international law.

Today's Update continues our coverage of the Gaza flotilla tragedy, with articles that attempt to put this specific event into the wider regional and strategic context. It also has some new expert comment on the controversial outcome of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review conference, which concluded on the weekend.

That five of the six boats were taken peaceably indicates that Israel never intended to harm any civilians. Israel was wise enough to film the incident, thereby providing irrefutable evidence that its soldiers were attacked first, and acted in self defence. Fortunately, the violence was confined to one boat and the aid on board the flotilla will reach Gaza in one piece.

Israel told flotilla organisers the aid could be transferred across the Gaza-Israel land border. (It still will be.) The flotilla could also have co-operated with Egypt or the UN in order to help Palestinians, but refused to do so. Helping Palestinians wasn't its goal, confronting Israel was.

With the intensive coverage in the media this Update will not attempt to re-hash the known facts of the Israeli raid on Monday on a flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza. Instead the focus will be on the aftermath and the potential fallout.

The current proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are premature and risk precipitating a third intifada for which the Jewish state will be blamed while Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah become the main beneficiaries, warns Arab Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.

Israel considers itself to be in a state of war with Hamas-ruled Gaza; Being at war with Hamas, Israel is within its rights to enforce a maritime blockade on Gaza in order to prevent Hamas from obtaining weapons and other materiel that would aid its war effort

Many are quick to dismiss incitement as irrelevant to the immediate task of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This view is misinformed and short-sighted. Incitement helps make peace impossible.

The evidence offered by the Guardian does show that South Africa was interested in nuclear weapons, but the evidence that Israel was prepared to offer them such weapons is, at best, highly inferential.

The Palestinian Authority has named numerous locations and events after Palestinian terrorists responsible for killing Israeli civilians. In this special report, Palestinian Media Watch investigates the breadth of this phenomenon and to what extent it continues in 2010.

This Update has some comment and information on the flotilla of activists reportedly heading for Gaza to "break the siege." It also has a response by Palestinian-Israeli journalist and recent visitor to Australia Khaled Abu Toameh to being labelled a "traitor" by Ali Kazak, the former PLO representative in Australia, earlier this month.

If the Palestinians are ever going to have a successful state, it will only come after they stop focusing on what they think other people have done to them, and start focusing on what they can do for themselves.

As readers are probably aware, and as expected for a number of weeks, it was announced on Monday that US-mediated Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks are now beginning. While it is not clear yet how significant the actual difference is between the previous situation - where US envoy George Mitchell shuttled between the two sides to talk about talks - and the new situation - where Mitchell will shuttle between the two sides to discuss more substantive proposals hopefully leading to direct talks - this Update looks at the background and prospects of the new, long-awaited reality.

Israel cannot rely on statehood in itself to satisfy Palestinian aspirations, and so must have both security guarantees and a Palestinian leadership able to credibly enforce them. That last condition does not exist today.

Today's Update looks at the contours of American foreign policy in the wake of recent speeches and articles by senior US Middle East experts not especially noted for their pro-Israel views recommending a reappraisal of the global significance of, and best approach to, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The reporting of Israel's Anat Kamm affair in Australia was a mixed bag, with a fair amount of sensationalism in many cases. Hopefully, those paying attention were able to absorb the following key details which correct the more sensationalist versions of the story.

Today's Update features some articles clarifying illusions and myths which feature prominently in what is probably the most common approach to the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process", especially in terms of US and foreign efforts to advance it.

As noted in the last Update, reports from Washington suggest the US Administration is considering the idea of putting forward its own Israeli-Palestinian peace plan which it would then attempt to impose on the parties.

The announcement could hardly have been more mistimed. Having first angered Biden it then embarrassed Netanyahu, then threw into a tizzy US-Israeli diplomacy and, while at it, dented what little progress had been made on the peace process.

Although the resolution appears very clear, progressing there is desperately, exasperatingly difficult. Unfortunately, the well-meaning but relatively inexperienced Obama Administration has shown a counter-productive tendency to act out of this frustration rather than careful analysis.

"I absolutely know that in anybody's eyes I was a traitor," says Mosab Hassan Yousef. "To my family, to my nation, to my God. I crossed all the red lines in my society. I didn't leave one that I didn't cross."

As flawed as Hari's piece is, in reflecting the strident view that Palestinians are simply blameless victims, it does serve one useful purpose - it helps explain ongoing Palestinian intransigence.

Today's Update focuses on what the crisis generated by the Obama Administration's statements on Israel's building plans in eastern Jerusalem - culminating in three new demands on Israel ostensibly to prove their peacemaking bona fides - seem to indicate about the Administration's approach to Middle East peacemaking.

As readers may be aware, US Vice-President Joe Biden has been in Israel for discussions and to launch US-mediated indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians after 14 months of stalemate.

Local and international media made much ado about the one-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, Israel's military operation over December 2008 and January 2009 in the Gaza Strip to suppress Qassam rocket fire at Israeli civilians. But residents of Sderot, the Israeli town just three kilometres from the Gaza border, say they can't understand what all the excitement is about.